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THE 

GHOST IN HAMLET 

AND OTHER .£SSAYS IN 
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 

BY 

MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN, LL.D. 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, CATHOLIC 
UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA 




CHICAGO 
A. C. McCLURG & CO, 

1906 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two C0DIC9 Recdved 

APR 5 1906 

i»yrL'ht Entry 



/^ 



COPY 



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^ hakijfcpc'u r ' t an > ! 



Copyright by 

A. C. McClurg & Co. 

1906 

Published March 28, 1906 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE| U. S. A, 



TO 

JOHN LANCASTER SPALDING 



NOTE 

These pieces are called essays in comparative 
literature because they are founded on qualities 
in literature that constantly connote compari- 
son, contrast, and the influence of the writer on 
readers or hearers, who in turn affect him. 

Maurice Francis Egan. 



6 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. The Ghost in Hamlet 1 1 

II. Some Phases of Shakespearean Inter- 
pretation 49 

III. Some Pedagogical Uses of Shakespeare 79 

IV. Lyrism in Shakespeare's Comedies . 1 1 1 

V. The Puzzle of Hamlet .... 139 

VI. The Greatest of Shakespeare's Con- 
temporaries 171 

VII. Imitators of Shakespeare . . . . 201 

VIII. The Comparative Method in Lit- 
erature 235 

IX. A Definition of Literature . . . 267 

X. The Ebb and Flow of Romance . . 293 



THE GHOST IN HAMLET 



The Ghost in Hamlet 
and other Essays 

THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

THE number of questions raised 
by Shakespeare's "Hamlet" have 
been legion ; but there can be 
no question as to the remote source of 
the play. It was the " Historic of Ham- 
blet," attributed to Saxo Grammaticus, 
who wrote it as a chapter in the history 
of Denmark. It was translated into 
French by Belleforest, and " imprinted '* 
in English " by Richard Bradocke, for 
Thomas Pauier," at his shop " in Corne- 
hill, neere to the Royall Exchange," Lon- 
don, 1608. To students who yearn to 
get at the meaning of the play, who are 
more interested in Shakespeare's work 
than in what he read or knew, it is of 
little moment whether he found the story 
of Hamlet in French or in English, or 



H THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

whether he drew it from an older dirAf»>» 
than the one we find in the first and sec^r>^ 
quartos and the first folio. "The play's 
the thing." 

It is quite evident that Shakespeare!? 
Hamlet owes almost everything, excep"^ 
illumination, the inexplicable synthetic 
quality of genius, to the " Historie of 
Hamblet.'* A careful comparison will 
show this, though it will reveal the 
marvellous transformation which mere 
material takes in the hand of the artist; 
as an example of the relations of the 
chronicler to the poet, the power of com- 
pilation to that of imaginative synthesis, 
and life to literature, it is even more apt 
than the study of the " Morte Arthure " 
of Sir Thomas Malory in comparison with 
the "Idyls of the King." 

There can be no doubt that " Hamlet " 
is the study of a mind, a study, — it seems 
absurd at this time in the life of the Trag- 
edy to ust an adjective to qualify it, — a 
consummate study of a very delicate yet 
not unbalanced mind. But since Goethe 
wrote, after the faint praise of Dryden 
and the neglect of so many years, it has 
been so much the fashion to strive to 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 15 

jfuvdjl beyond this complete and adequate 
j^^^y, that those of the public who read 
a^la^ut Shakespeare without reading his 
W/orks are justified in concluding that the 
xuthor of " Hamlet " neglected his duty 
fH not leaving a " key " to it. We have 
^ery reason to believe that the Eliza- 
bethans understood " Hamlet " ; that they 
desired no lecturers to explain it before 
the scene at Elsinore opened ; that it was 
not in their opinion a problem play. 
Why, then, should it be in our time 
obscure to so many who express such 
unbounded and even ecstatic love for it? 
The motive and the action are entirely 
clear when not mutilated in their expres- 
sion to suit the demands of the modern 
theatre. Naturally, a change has taken 
place in the point of view. Auditors of 
to-day do not look on the divinity that 
formerly hedged a king as a quality of 
daily life, but they expect in literature and 
on the stage a condition of virtue and self- 
sacrifice — altruism is the word — which is 
not usual in their thoughts in dealing with 
their everyday relations with their neigh- 
bors. For instance, the millionaire who 
forecloses a mortgage on the land of a 



i6 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

struggling farmer is a monster in a novel 
or on the stage, and poetry shudders at 
him ; but in real life he dines with other 
persons who have hurled murderers to 
justice, pleaded in court for the vengeance 
of the law upon lesser offenders, and who 
would not hesitate to shoot in hot or cold 
blood the insulters or injurers of their 
fathers, mothers, wives, or children. Of 
Hamlet the Prince, whose father has been 
killed foully, whose mother has been 
stained and degraded in sight of his peo- 
ple, whose kingdom has been usurped, 
even by the election of the corrupt nobles 
and the connivance of that demoralized 
mother, the auditors of to-day demand, 
as a matter of course, an excessive altru- 
ism based on Christian principles seldom 
applied in modern life to actual condi- 
tions. Hamlet's plain duty, in the trag- 
edy, is to obey the command of his 
father's spirit. The Elizabethans saw it 
in this way. It was clear, according to 
their ethics, that Hamlet's struggle was 
a struggle against duty, not a virtuous 
doubt as to whether it was right for him 
to destroy the clever, kingly, unscru- 
pulous, and subtle villain whose sin 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 17 

in marrying his brother's wife, coupled 
with the rumor of a more horrible and 
secret crime, darkened and threatened to 
curse the whole State of Denmark. Miss 
Fredericka Beardsley Gilchrist, in a re- 
markably frank and original interpre- 
tation of ^* The True Story of Hamlet 
and Ophelia," ^ says of the reader of 
Shakespeare : 

" He must be ready to believe that Shake- 
speare's text contains all the material needed to 
make the play intelligible, and he must seek for 
the meaning of the text, without considering 
what this or that commentator thinks about it. 
At the same time he must remember that play- 
goers of Shakespeare's day probably compre- 
hended the drama perfectly, for they possessed 
a help to its understanding which we have not, 
— the actors who portrayed it knew what 
Shakespeare intended them to portray. This 
the modern student must discern for himself, 
remembering always that the text, unless it has 
been hopelessly distorted, is subject to the same 
interpretation now as then." 

The modern student receives, as a rule, 
very little help from the modern actor, 

J Boston : Little, Brown, Sc Co., 1889. 
2 



i8 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

who arranges Shakespeare's plays to suit 
his special powers, and who does not hesi- 
tate to " adapt " speeches and to cut out 
such passages as he chooses. It is not to 
the theatre that the student must go for 
aid, but to "Hamlet" itself, as seen in 
the text collated by the help of the two 
quartos and the first folio. He will find 
certain inconsistencies, some merely appar- 
ent because of his lack of ability to pro- 
ject himself into Elizabethan and Jacobean 
England. This lack of ability is not con- 
fined to the student, but to the commen- 
tators whom he, often in spite of his own 
better judgment, or rather his instinct, 
follows. 

One of the most flagrant examples of 
this blind following of the opinions of 
others is shown in the varying comments 
on the position of the Ghost, — a most 
important x)ne in " Hamlet." It did not 
surprise the English of the beginning of 
the seventeenth century that the mur- 
dered King should come from the state 
of purgation in which many Englishmen 
still believed. It is impossible to kill the 
vital beliefs of a nation by mere edicts ; 
and the announcement of King Hamlet 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 19 

that he had been murdered without 
chance of confession, with his sins upon 
his soul, did not imply, as it would have 
implied to the Puritan mind, that he was 
either in heaven or hell. He was in the 
middle state, suffering terribly, knowing, 
too, that his beloved kingdom of Den- 
mark was in the grip of a monstrous 
usurper, and that, if his son were not 
awakened to the danger of the moment, 
his dynasty must pass, perhaps forever, 
from the throne. The auditors, in Shake- 
speare's time, took the Ghost seriously. 
He was not merely a piece of perfunc- 
tory stage machinery; he was the better 
part of a good man — not a saintly man 
— and of a noble king. He had sinned, 
but he had not died in mortal sin ; he 
was suffering in purging fire, with the tor- 
ment of an awful secret upon him, fore- 
knowing that, as a king and a patriot, he 
ought to reveal this secret to the Prince, 
his son. He must be mute by day, but 
at night he may speak, and he may not 
reveal too much. Let us observe how 
the mission and message of the Ghost 
are, as a rule, treated. King Hamlet is 
"^necessary to the play," and that is all ! 
The Ghost is a stock figure in the dramas 



20 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

of the group of writers to which Shake- 
speare belonged, and that is all ! He de- 
mands revenge from a son too moral and 
"modern-minded" to accept his dictum 
of spirit, and that is all. These conclu- 
sions are either frivolous or foolish. And 
yet, unless the character of the Ghost be 
made consistent with the Christian tradi- 
tions of the time, they must be accepted. 
If we accept them, the drama becomes both 
frivolous and foolish; but as it is one of 
the most solemn and sublime emanations 
of human genius, they cannot be accepted. 
The Ghost is not a mere theatrical fig- 
ure. Hamlet is not a modern altruist, 
analyzing his mind from the point of view 
of Mr. Henry James and frightened by 
the bloodthirsty demands of his father. 
King Hamlet had been a creature of flesh 
and blood, and he spoke in deadly ear- 
nest, for the salvation of his kingdom, for 
the punishment of sin, to his son, the heir 
of that kingdom, the Prince of Denmark, 
who on his mother's death would be 
king. That other theory, that the Ghost 
was an illusion, is dispersed very carefully 
in the beginning of the play. With his 
usual skill in making the intention of 
the situation clear, Shakespeare converts 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 21 

Horatio from a doubter to a believer fully 
convinced. , The Ghost might be the illu- 
sion of an overwrought mind, In the awful 
scene between the mother and son, when 
the example of Nero and Agrippina is 
only too near Hamlet's vengeful mind ; 
but the whole spirit of the tragedy is 
against that supposition. Whatever might 
be said in its favor should, however, be 
considered ; but the letter, the meaning, 
the movement of all the scenes in " Ham- 
let " leading to the revelation of the be- 
trayed and assassinated King, in whose 
person the whole State of Denmark was 
betrayed and assassinated, show that the 
Ghost was a spirit, waiting, in suffering, 
to be cleansed of the stains of earth. 

Saxo Grammaticus wrote the story of 
Hamlet in the twelfth century; the French 
translation appeared in 1570; the only 
edition we have of the English transla- 
tion is put in 1608. Dr. Furnlvall, in 
his preface to the " Leopold " Shake- 
speare, says, " We know well how all Scan- 
dinavian legend and history are full of the 
duty of revenge for a father's murder." 
This, however, would not have been 
enough to prevent the mission and 



22 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

message of the Ghost from shocking the 
moral sensibilities of the English people, 
who loved to read " Hamlet/' as we see by 
the number of printed editions, as well as 
to see it acted. The scene was not put in 
a pagan time, the sentiments of the play- 
were not pagan ; the tone was much more 
of the sixteenth century than of the sixth ; 
therefore the fact that the duty of revenge 
for a father's murder was inculcated in 
Scandinavian literature would be insuffi- 
cient, unless specially emphasized from a 
pagan Scandinavian point of view, to 
arouse the unqualified sympathy of the 
English. It must be admitted that these 
Elizabethans, like their contemporary 
Spaniards and Italians, found nothing 
offensive in a mixture of Christian sym- 
bolism and pagan mythology in their 
poems and plays ; but the spectacle of a 
Christian king, lamenting his sinfulness, 
demanding the blood of his murderer for 
having cut him off from the consolations 
and helps of religion,^ could scarcely have 

I Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, 
Unhousel'd, disappointed, unaneled, 
No reckoning made, but sent to my account 
With ail my imperfections on my head : 
O, horrible ! O, horrible ! most horrible I 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 23 

pleased auditors who were neither irrev- 
erent nor unintelhgent, nor does any- 
thing in Shakespeare's work warrant the 
supposition that he would have presented 
such a contradiction. It has been sug- 
gested that Shakespeare's " Hamlet," fol- 
lowing the " Historie of Hamblet," mixed 
the pagan with the Christian in matters 
more essential than mythological allusions ; 
and it is true that the Hamblet of Saxo 
Grammaticus and Belleforest had two 
wives ; but then, his chronicler says, he 
had not yet received the light of the Gos- 
pel. The chronicler admires the Prince 
of Denmark extremely, though he was 
not a Christian, and he excuses his ven- 
geance wreaked on his uncle Fengon 
(Shakespeare's Claudius) by examples 
from the Old Testament : 

"If vengeance euer seemed to haue any shew 
of iustice, it is then, when pietie and affection 
constraineth vs to remember our fathers un- 
iustly murdred, as the things wherby we are 
dispensed withal, & which seeke the means not 
to leaue treason and murther vnpunished : see- 
ing Dauid a holy & iust king, & of nature sim- 
ple, courteous and debonaire, yet when he dyed 
he charged his sonne Salomon (that succeeded 



24 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

him in his throane) not to suffer certaine men 
that had done him iniurie to escape vnpunished: 
Not that this holy King (as then readie to dye. 
and to giue account before God of all his ac- 
tions) was carefull or desirous of reuenge, but 
to leaue this example vnto us, that where the 
Prince or Country is interessed, the desire of 
reuenge cannot by any meanes (how smallj 
soeuer) beare the title of condemnation, but is 
rather commendable and worthy of praise : for 
otherwise the good kings of luda, nor others 
had not pursued them to death, that had of- 
fended their predecessors, if God himselfe had 
not inspired and ingrauen that desire within their 
hearts. Hereof the Athenian laws beare wit- 
nesse, whose custome was to erect Images in 
remembrance of those men that, reuenging the 
iniuries of the Common wealth, boldly massa- 
cred tyrants and such as troubled the peace and 
welfare of the Citizens." 

This is the apology of a Christian 
chronicler for a pagan prince, in which 
reasons of state, as well as filial piety, are 
cited. But the means by which Shake 
speare's Hamlet discerns the murder anc 
incest committed by his uncle are differ- 
ent from those named in the " Historie 
of Hamblet." No ghost appears in the 
" Historie,** though it is hinted that 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 25 

Hamblet the pagan was wise in divina- 
tion, and that " it would seem miraculus 
yt Hamblet shold divine in yt sort, which 
often prooued so true (yt as I said be- 
fore,) the diuel had not knowledge of 
things past, but to grant it he knoweth 
things to come," — this Hamblet having 
been instructed in the devilish art whereby 
" the wicked spirit abuseth mankind, and 
advertiseth him, (as he can) of things 
past." 

In Shakespeare's " Hamlet " no such 
education in deviltry is suggested. Ham- 
let has thought deeply at Wittenberg, 
where free thought was the fashion, but he 
has not attempted, like Benvenuto Cellini, 
to raise spirits. And Shakespeare fills the 
Ghost with so much pathos, with such 
nobility, that it is evident that the spirit 
speaks not to deceive ; he has no connec- 
tion with the arts of the devil, though at 
times his son doubts him. To the eyes 
of the Christian, — let us take the posi- 
tion of the translators of the " His- 
toric," for example, — the spectacle of 
'i Christian son urged to personal ven- 
geance by a Christian father, who hopes 
for heaven, would be abhorrent ; and the 



26 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Elizabethans, who, if we may judge 
by the dramas they loved best, insisted 
on high ideals, would not have tolerated 
it. Whatever may be said of the drama 
in general, one thing is certain, — the 
successful play must have the sympathy 
of the audience. It is certain, then, that 
" Hamlet," one of the most successful 
of Shakespeare's plays, had that sym- 
pathy ; and that Shakespeare deliberately 
maintained it by exalting the mission 
of the Ghost to the utmost is equally 
certain. 

In the " Historic," Geruth — the Ger- 
trude of "Hamlet" — has fallen before 
her husband's death ; her crime is " in- 
cestuous," as it is with Shakespeare, v/ho 
permits us to believe that Gertrude did 
not sin lentil after her husband's death. It 
is the same crime that Henry VIII, in his 
delicate scrupulosity, insisted that he had 
committed because his brother Arthur 
had been husband to Queen Katharine. 
The matter needed no explanation to the 
citizens of London under Elizabeth or 
James I. The whole subject had been, 
and still was, a matter of moment con- 
cerned much with the state of the realm. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 27 

Both Church and State in England still 
held the Catholic traditions about mar- 
riage, though they had ostensibly rejected 
its sacramental character. The sin of 
Claudius and the Queen, the corruption 
of the court, the melancholy of the 
young Hamlet, the evil rumors of the 
taking off of the King, — all these things 
prepared men's minds for strange appari- 
tions, and even the valiant soldiers guard- 
ing the court were expectant that some 
solemn or horrible event, on which 
they had brooded during long winter 
nights, would happen, betokening evil, at 
Elsinore. 

The soldiers, who fear nothing of flesh 
and blood, tremble at every shadow. 
There has been talk of a walking spirit, — 
the spirit of a righteous king fearing some 
ill that threatens his kingdom. Francisco 
is on guard, just before the dawn, on this 
night in the late Winter. Mystery is in 
the air. The kingdom is alive with war- 
like preparations. Are the people about to 
rise against Claudius, who has wedded his 
brother's wife with unseemly and indecent 
haste, and been named king, doubtless at 
her request, with equally indecent haste ? 



28 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

The Prince Hamlet, bereft of his rightful 
place, has proposed to lead no revolt (this 
his few intimates about the court knew), 
though many outside who love him would 
be ready to follow him. There are many, 
inaeed, out of and in the court, ready 
to rid the country of the politic Clau- 
dius, who holds his throne by diplomacy 
and the favor of the Queen. Thinking 
of what may happen in this sin-stained 
land, — for the marriage of Claudius and 
the Queen is incestuous, not only in the 
minds of the Danes, but in the minds 
of the auditors in London, — Francisco 
stands, waiting for the guard to relieve 
him. Bernardo comes, and just then 
there is no glimpse of the moon through 
the darkened air. He is afraid of no 
earthly thing ; but the figure of the sen- 
tinel panoplied in guise of war — for so 
King Hamlet has appeared — startles 
him. Instead of waiting for his comrade's 
challenge, he calls out, almost tremulously, 
" Who 's there ? " Francisco rebukes this 
breach of military usage. " Nay, answer 
me^^ he calls ; " stand and unfold your- 
self" Much relieved by the sound of 
this human voice, he answers naturally. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 29 

" Long live the King ! " To which 
Francisco, who has doubtless ' had his 
own fears, says doubtfully : 

Bernardo ? 
Ber. He! 

Francisco, no longer doubting, praises 
his promptness. Bernardo, the man on 
duty, says, with a sigh, 

'Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco. 
Fran. For this relief much thanks ; *t is bitter 
cold. 
And I am sick at heart. 

Bernardo is not heartened by this ; he 
knows that the fear neither of battle nor 
of sudden death ever made Francisco sick 
at heart, but there are things not of earth 
that make the bravest heart sick at thoughts 
of th,em. He does not want to be alone. 
He asks Francisco, on his way to bed, to 
hasten the coming of the companions of 
his watch, Horatio and Marcellus. Hap- 
pily, they arrive before Francisco goes 
away. Marcellus asks Bernardo at once 
about the Ghost, which is uppermost in 
all their minds, except in that of the well- 
balanced Horatio, Bernardo is glad to 



30 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

say that he has seen nothing ; and here 
Shakespeare makes sure that the auditors 
shall understand that the Ghost is no illu- 
sion. "Tush, tush, 'twill not appear," 
the doubting but tolerant Horatio says. 
It does appear, however. Horatio trem- 
bles and looks pale. 

Before my God, I might not this believe 
Without the sensible and true avouch 
Of mine own eyes. 

Horatio is not a man to be easily 
deceived. At every opportunity Shake- 
speare takes occasion to show that. An- 
other thing that Shakespeare makes plain 
by every possible emphasis is that King 
Hamlet comes not so much on a personal 
mission as on a mission for the salvation 
of Denmark. He comes as the Royal 
Dane, the defender of his kingdom, clad 
in all the panoply of a warrior king ; he 
bears the truncheon, the symbol of kingly 
power, — not "in his habit as he lived*' 
as man, — not as he slept in the garden 
after dinner, or as he had jested with his 
little son and Yorick. He does not come 
in the easy garb in which he was mur- 
dered, to show himself to Hamlet disfigured 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 31 

by the poison and to excite his anger. 
The State is wounded in his royal person. 
To paraphrase Louis XIV, " L'etat, c'est 
lui." In striking him Claudius had struck 
down religion, truth, loyalty, the very 
essence and flower of law and order. He 
was the anointed king of the Danes, as 
James I was the anointed king and lord 
of the Britons, — and the Britons were 
not permitted to forget that the chrism 
had touched that royal brow. It was not 
necessary to explain the situation to them. 
It was the sacred right and duty of a most 
Christian king to put upon his heir the 
burden of justice. Vengeance might be 
the term used, but it was vengeance in the 
Scriptural sense, " Vengeance is mine, saith 
the Lord, I will repay." The murdered 
king had no need to summon a jury ; he 
was the instrument of the Lord ; vindic- 
tive justice was righteous justice. Bound 
for his sins to silence, he suffers more 
than the agony of the purging fire, and 
when his chance comes, the king and the 
man, the patriot and the father, struggle 
with one another in the ineffectual human 
speech he is obliged to use. He cannot 
speak as a spirit to a spirit ; he must speak 



32 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

as a man to a man, and he speaks by sym- 
bols as well as words. Marcellus asks : 

Is it not like the king? 
Hor. As thou art to thyself: 
Such was the very armour he had on 
When he the ambitious Norway combated ; 
So frowned he once, when, in an angry parle. 
He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice. 
*Tis strange. 

Mar. Thus twice before, and jump at this dead 
hour. 
With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch. 

Hor. In what particular thought to work I know 
not ; 
But in the gross and scope of my opinion. 
This bodes some strange erupdon to our state. 

The first — and evidently the logical 
and natural — thought that strikes Hora- 
tio is that the appearance of this figure 
portends danger to the State. There 
have been warlike preparations ; for young 
Fortinbras, the antithesis of Hamlet, is 
threatening the frontier, — knowing, no 
doubt, of the rottenness within, having 
wisely chosen his opportunity. As Ber- 
nardo says, 

This portentous figure 
Comes armed through our watch ; so like the king 
That was and is the question of these wars. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 33 

Horatio, a scholar, versed in the lan- 
guage of exorcism, and the natural leader 
of those about him, makes the sign of the 
cross before it. He appeals as a Chris- 
tian and patriot to it. 

Stay, illusion ! 
If thou hast any sound, or use of voice. 
Speak to me : 

If there be any good thing to be done. 
That may to thee do ease and grace to me. 
Speak to me : 

If thou art privy to thy country's fate. 
Which, happily, foreknowing may avoid, 
O, speak ! 

Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life 
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth. 
For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death. 
Speak of it ! 

The cock crows ; the spirit fades from 
human sight, and Horatio feels that the 
mystical creature will talk only to young 
Hamlet. 

Later, Hamlet speaks to Horatio of 
his father, and in his scorn of his mother's 
neglect of that noble shade and in his ten- 
derness, says that his picture comes that 
very moment to his mind. He speaks as 
any sorrowing son would speak ; his father 
3 



34 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

is before him, but he does not pretend 
that it is the spirit of his father. There 
is no delusion; Hamlet is not insane at 
any time, and his amazement is great 
when Horatio, whom of all men he cannot 
doubt, says, still emphasizing the martial 
and kingly bearing of the Ghost : 

A figure like your father. 
Armed at point exactly, cap-a-pie. 
Appears before them, and with solemn march 
Goes slow and stately by them : thrice he walked 
By their oppress' d and fear-surprised eyes. 
Within his truncheon's length. 

The accent on the military appearance of 
the King is deepened. 

Ham. Arm'd, say you? 

n ' [■ Arm'd, my Lord. 

Ham. From top to toe ? 

^^^' \ My Lord, from head to foot. 

Hamlet asks other terse, intense ques- 
tions ; and when the others have left him, 
he concludes : 

My father's spirit in arms ! all is not well ; 
I doubt some foul play : would the night were come ! 
Till then sit still, my soal : foul deeds will rise. 
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 35 

To Hamlet, of a fine nature but not 
of the stuff of which kings are made, the 
appearance of his father's spirit has merely 
a personal significance; and his failure — 
for the climax of tragedy in the play is 
not the death of Hamlet, but his failure 
— to understand the high and noble 
mission of the suffering King is the cause 
of the ruin that comes on all except 
Horatio. Horatio and Fortinbras are 
brave and simple. Fortinbras isthought- 
lessly resolute and straightforward ; a di- 
rect line is his model. Horatio is more 
sophisticated, — a higher type, — but, once 
convinced, he acts ; once convinced, he 
has neither scruples nor doubts. The 
simple faith of Fortinbras gains Den- 
mark for him ; the lack of complexity in 
Horatio makes him the one sane, strong 
man in the tragedy. Horatio thinks of 
his country and of his duty to it ; Ham- 
let's outlook does not go beyond his own 
mind and heart. The horrible revelation 
of his mother's fall drives him almost 
mad, for he had revered and loved her 
as immaculate. 

Denmark must be purged, — the Ghost 
dwells on the details of the foul crime. 



36 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

— that Denmark may not be the chosen 
place of "luxury and damned incest." 

But, howsoever thou pursuest this act. 
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive 
Against thy mother aught : leave her to Heaven 
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge. 
To prick and sting her. 

Hamlet, left alone, calls on the powers 
of heaven and earth. " And shall I couple 
hell ? " he asks, and for the moment re- 
jects the temptation. He believes that 
this is the spirit of his father. King and 
Royal Dane; but he accepts the mission 
as one of personal vengeance ; he begins 
at once " to taint his mind " with thoughts 
of revenge, not only on Claudius, but 
on Queen Gertrude ; for the instant his 
thoughts are as hellish as those of Nero 
planning the death of Agrippina. He 
vows himself — sweeping away ambition, 
and the love of Ophelia, who cannot be 
pure since the noblest of women is impure 

— to vengeance. He is not the Prince, 
the heir of the kingdom, the savior of j 
his country, but the wronged man threat- I 
ening to return evil for evil. The Ghost 
can speak no more to him, for the morn is 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 37 

near. The wounded heart of the man 
had neutralized the cry for justice of the 
King ; but it was too late : he could say 
no more, but only " Taint not thy mind/' 
The action was now with Hamlet; and 
Hamlet, 

Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, — 

of the philosophic doubt of Wittenberg, 
— is not great enough to understand. He 
is "prompted to his revenge by heaven 
and hell," he says. Fortinbras looks on 
his mission as prompted by heaven, as 
part of his duty to a father slain. Hora- 
tio would have seen the welfare of the 
kingdom at stake, but doubt makes 
Hamlet weak. He trusts Horatio only; 
he has no faith in the love of the people 
for him, — that very people waiting, as 
we see at the revolt of the ever-beloved 
Laertes, to follow any brave man against 
the incestuous King. Hamlet hesitates ; 
the spirit may be the devil, who may 
have assumed this pleasing shape to lead 
him to damnation, as the evil one is 
potent with melancholy minds, — and 
Hamlet fears his own weakness and 
melancholy. 



38 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

He must have another test ; he must 
prove the truth of the Ghost, for he is not 
strong enough to believe. That test he 
appHes, all the while hanging on a revenge 
prompted alike by heaven and hell. Why- 
should he have coupled hell with the duty 
of a prince and the sorrows of a son ? 
The Ghost has not urged him to league 
himself with evil. He has not asked him 
to kill Claudius in hot blood or to com- 
pass his ruin by intrigues. The truth is 
that Hamlet is not noble enough to inter- 
pret the message of his father. It is folly 
to overload the situation of Hamlet with 
arguments dravv'n from the theologians. 
Shakespeare was not a scientific theolo- 
gian. In the mood of men of his time, 
who hoped for heaven and feared hell, it 
was the duty of a man to bring the mur- 
derer of another to justice, — much m.ore 
so the duty of a prince to bring.the assas- 
sin of a kingly father to justice. Claudius 
had placed himself beyond the law, and 
the pitiful heavens themselves shuddered 
at his crimes, which cried aloud for justice. 
As a person, Hamlet might have forgiven 
Claudius and bidden him go his way and 
sin no more, as the Ghost charitably 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 39 

forgives Gertrude, thinking only of the 
salvation of her " fighting soul." The 
Ghost has no doubt of his right to com- 
mand his son to punish the monster who 
has deprived him of his human person- 
ality and who is corrupting the kingdom. 
The Ghost, to the auditors at the theatre 
in London, represented the State ; he was 
the anointed king demanding justice for 
sacrilege, providing for the peace of the 
kingdom, and the life even of the rightful 
heir. The Ghost does not ask Hamlet to 
kill for the mere pleasure of killing ; he 
does not desire the loss of the soul of his 
enemy, though this enemy has killed a 
king and married with his wife. The 
Ghost speaks as a king ; his woe and 
agony are poured almost involuntarily 
into the ear of his amiazed son ; and, 
after he has cried out for vindictive jus- 
tice, he remembers perhaps that he may be 
misunderstood, and whispers to the Prince, 

Taint not thy mind. 

That Hamlet's test by the play con- 
firms the truth of the message of the 
Ghost we know, and that he delays action 
we know. We can imagine how Fortinbras 



40 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

or even the half-corrupted Laertes would 
have acted at this time. Horatio would 
have understood the Ghost's words as 
bidding him deprive the usurper of the 
throne and save the Queen from the worst 
in her. He would not have doubted nor 
would he have let hate so overmaster him 
as to desire to destroy the very soul of the 
usurper of the throne. It would have suf- 
ficed for him to know that Claudius was 
the regicide, the enemy of society, the 
outlaw, and he would have acted in ac- 
cordance with the accepted principles of 
justice. Having received the perturbed 
spirit as that of the King, he would have 
doubted no more. Evidence he would 
doubtless have collected for its value to 
others, but he would have needed no 
other testimony to add to the avouch- 
ment of his own eyes. As to hell, or 
hatred which is of hell, or the satisfaction 
of this hatred, it would have been cast 
aside. Fortinbras would have attacked the 
King and his court at once with a band 
of resolutes ; Laertes would have hated 
and raised the people. Hamlet, doubting 
still, hates and hesitates. He spares the 
King for fear that Claudius, dying at 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 41 

prayer, may not be damned ; the pow- 
ers of hell possess his soul ; he forg ets 
the noble part of the message. He 
rushes to his mother to accuse her. 

Let not ever 
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom : 
Let me be cruel, not unnatural ! 

His heart has been filled with thoughts 
of murder, in spite of the strict com- 
mand of his father to be tender with her. 
When she fears that he will kill her and 
voices her fear, Polonius calls for help 
and is killed, like a rat behind the arras. 
Impatiently, urged by passion, Hamlet 
would have cut the knot which he had 
not sufficient strength to unweave. He 
is passion's slave ; passion has made him 
tardy ; he has doubted and raved, and 
longed to taste the sweetness of satiated 
hatred, yet never dared to strike. It is 
passion or doubt, or doubt or passion, — 
whichever is uppermost, — that has frozen 
action. He has killed, and he wills to 
kill ; he is not the Prince seeking justice 
for a crime against the nation, but a mere 
individual not even justifying the means 
by the end ; he knows the end is bad ; he 



42 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

believes at times that the Ghost was the 
devil, and he accepts his message devil- 
ishly. Out of his weakness he has 
coupled hell with heaven and earth ; out 
of his weakness and passion comes the 
murder of Polonius. The purpose the 
Ghost proposed, as Royal Dane, guardian 
and protector of the kingdom, is blunted 
by the sleet of undisciplined rage. He 
delights in torturing his mother. The 
great heart of the King cannot endure 
this ; he sees that his son has lost sight, 
in the storm and stress of rage, of the 
message of justice and righteousness. 
Hamlet merely mutters and rages against 
Claudius ; he cries out in bitter and per- 
sonal scorn against him ; he raves ; he 
contemns, — he is a vengeful boy, not 
a just prince. "A king of shreds and 
patches ! " he exclaims ; he knows how 
to use words. Then comes the piteous 
Ghost, stricken, tortured, not now in the 
panoply of the King, truncheoned, majes- 
tic, but "in his habit as he lived." He 
appeals to Hamlet's nobler self, for the 
real purpose of his midnight mission, 
and for the Queen. 

O, step betv/een her and her fighting soul ! 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 43 

Hamlet is called from hell ; under the 
influence of the Ghost's words, he urges 
the Queen to repentance : 

Queen. O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in 
tv^ain. "^ 

Ham. O, throw away the worser part of it. 
And live the purer with the other half. 

In the moment, Hamlet is almost worthy 
of his father. His speeches to his 
mother, after the departure of the Ghost, 
show the Christian in the man ; the man- 
ner in which he reasons for the Queen 
shows that when he sins he sins not 
through ignorance, for a closer grasp of 
the ethics of repentance there could not 
be. But he has fixed his thoughts on the 
mere killing of Claudius, and a mind so 
over-scrupulous, so delicate as his, shrinks, 
after all is said, from murder, when he 
must act, though he refuses to grasp 
the high meaning of his mission. He 
is not great enough, faithful enough, 
simple enough to be Denmark saving 
Denmark; he is only "I, Hamlet — I, 
Hamlet the man." He will embark for 
England with traitors and assassins rather 
than act ; he will intrigue, meet craft 



44 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

with craft, rather than appeal to the peo- 
ple, — a people to whom belief in spirits 
is not foreign, — and, releasing Horatio 
and Marcellus and Bernardo from their 
oath, tell the whole truth to the Danes, 
who already dislike Claudius and admire 
the younger Hamlet. He distrusts the 
people. His mother has failed him ; 
Ophelia has been made the tool of her 
father — frailty and woman — falsehood 
and man ! He will trust only himself; 
but he doubts all things, even himself. 
He thinks of the bravery of Fortinbras, 
moving on Claudius and Denmark with 
all odds apparently against him, to restore 
the honor of his name and country. " Ex- 
amples gross as earth" exhort him. If 
he would be royal, if he would be grandly 
noble, if he could conceive for an instant 
what his destiny should be, if he could 
soar above the Ego, if his doubt did not 
stand in the way of his desiring real hap- 
piness and perfection, he would not work 
the ruin of all about him ; for even Ho- 
ratio's heart must be blasted by Hamlet's 
failure. Doubt has blinded him ; he can- 
not see beyond his small subjective world; 
his mind is a kingdom in which he is a 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 45 

mere subject. He cannot be great and 
he cannot be base. He cannot accept 
the high and he will not unreservedly 
accept the low. Heaven dazzles him and 
hell affrights him, and he is too fine to be 
content with earth. He knows now the 
worst of the King and the Queen; he has 
tested them, and the word of the Ghost is 
corroborated, and yet he can only say, 
after he has tried to reason himself into 
fury : 

O, from this time forth. 
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth ! 

The voyage to England proves to him 
that he must settle the matter with his 
uncle finally or die. Conscience, speak- 
ing to him who coupled hell with a 
message that seemed to come from 
heaven, has made him a coward ; but 
now he can act as a man, for he must kill 
Claudius in self-defence. He had cruelly 
hoist Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with 
their own petard. Through him they 
have gone to their death. Still he talks 
about " conscience " ; he makes variations 
on the "me" and "my." He has suffi- 
cient cause and sufficient proof for ridding 



46 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Denmark of Claudius ; but he is still 
uncertain, although he thus speaks of 
Claudius : 

Popp'd in between the election and my hopes. 

Thrown out his angle for my proper life. 

And with such cozenage — is't not perfect conscience. 

To quit him with this arm ? and is 't not to be damn'd. 

To let this canker of our nature come 

In further evil ? 

Horatio implies that the time is short ; 
the opportunity must come soon, or 
Claudius may strike foul. 

Hamlet says : 

It will be short : the interim is mine ; 

And a man's life 's no- more than to say *' One.'* 

Hamlet, weak as usual, though now he 
knows what the mission of the Ghost was, 
since he sees in Claudius " the canker of 
our nature " and of Denmark, allows 
himself to be trapped ; he is diverted from 
his purpose : he dies, and his dynasty 
dies with him. Fortinbras, who believes 
and acts, enters triumphant, and the 
mission of the Ghost fails, because he 
who should have been a prince at heart 
was a prince only in name. Doubting, 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 47 

he coupled hell with heaven and earth, 
and so, like his nobler father, he died 
unsatisfied, — happier, however, than the 
elder Hamlet in one thing only : his last 
message reached ears capable of under- 
standing it. 



SOME PHASES OF SHAKE- 
SPEAREAN INTERPRETATION 



SOME PHASES OF SHAKE- 
SPEAREAN INTERPRETA- 
TION 

IT Is with much dissatisfaction that 
a lover of Shakespeare reads the 
various essays and volumes that pre- 
tend to show what the poet's personal 
religious faith or opinion really was. Ap- 
parently such inquiry soon degenerates into 
active and unreasonable partisanship, in 
which desire and imagination twist facts 
into all sorts of shapes. It is only neces- 
sary to examine nearly every modern critic 
of Shakespeare, including one of the latest, 
George Brandes,^ to show that the partisan 
is always behind the interpreter. Sir 
William Fraser, generally well balanced, 
loses his self-control, like the others, when 
he touches the author of " Hamlet." Sir 
William says, in " Hie et Ubique " :^ 

^ William Shakespeare : a Critical Study. London : 
Wm. Heinemann. 

2 New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 



52 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

" Two scenes in Shakespeare I have always 
regretted. I think that he transgresses in both 
the limits of art in different ways; they are to 
me most painful to read. The scene between 
Arthur and Hubert, in 'King John,' and that 
between Gloucester and Lady Anne, in ' Rich- 
ard the Third.' I can hardly suppose that such 
a scene as the latter can be true to nature. I 
hope that it is unnatural." 

So far Sir Willlam*s opinion is very good; 
and though eminent men of letters who 
assume to be psychologists tell us that 
Lady Anne did just what might have been 
expected of her, most of us doubtless have 
more sympathy with Sir William's point 
of view. Suddenly, not willing for a 
moment that even a pebble should be 
cast at the dramatist of his idolatry, he 
begins to interpret. " Has," he asks, 
" the idea suggested itself that this scene 
was put in by the poet to gratify Elizabeth 
by a reflection on her cousin and rival, 
Mary of Scotland, as to her marriage with 
the Duke of Orkney ? " 

Taking everything into consideration, 
this makes the judicious smihe, and Sir 
William does the best he can, under the 
circumstances, by putting the suggestion 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 53 

in the form of a question. But it must 
be admitted that some of the inferences of 
Mr. Richard Simpson, of M. Rio, of Mr. 
Wilkes, who take a brief for Shakespeare's 
Catholicism, are as far-fetched as this 
chance guess of Sir William Eraser's, or 
as the elaborate apologies for his supposed 
indifference to religion made by Vehse, 
Laird, Kreysig, or Tyler. The researches 
and opinions of the late Mr. Simpson are 
edited by Henry Sebastian Bowden, of 
the Oratory. " The Religion of Shake- 
speare " ^ is a valuable and interesting 
book, apart from what its author tries to 
prove, and to persons who have already 
made up their minds that all the greatest 
actors in the world's history were of the 
one Faith, either by anticipation or par- 
ticipation, it will be delightfully edifying 
and perennially refreshing. For there 
can be nothing more permanently agree- 
able than to find one's preferences cor- 
roborated in a well-printed, well-bound 
book. The defect in Mr. Simpson's 
" Religion of Shakespeare," which Father 

^ The Religion of Shakespeare : Chiefly from the 
Writings of the late Richard Simpson, M. A. London : 
Burns & Oates. 



54 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Bowden has carefully revised, lies in the 
thesis that either the Catholic Church or 
the Protestant opinion makes or unmakes 
a poet, or that either or any other religion 
" gives birth to a poet." " The Reformed 
creed was/' Father Bowden says, " we 
think, from its negative and materialistic 
tendency, unfitted to give birth to a poet." 
And then he quotes Mr. Matthew Ar- 
nold : " Catholicism, from its antiquity, 
its pretensions to universality, from its 
really widespread prevalence, from its 
sensuousness, has something European, 
august, and imaginative; Protestantism 
presents, from its inferiority in all these 
respects, something provincial, mean, and 
prosaic." It is not hard to admit this, 
nor is it hard to make manifest that the 
synthesizing power of CathoHcity has 
gathered all that is beautiful and splendid 
about it ; it is needless to express what is 
so evident. The austere creed of Calvin 
cut away from the splendor and beauty even 
of the Bible it professed to idolize. But 
human nature and tradition and genius have 
been too strong for artificial bonds, even 
for that false asceticism which occasionally 
shows itself among modern Catholics. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 55 

It is assumed, too, by many of the 
opposing interpreters of Shakespeare, that 
he was everything but a poet, although 
they pretend great reverence for him 
under this title ; in reality, however, they 
strain every nerve to prove that he was 
a philosopher, a historian, a sociologist, 
a conscious psychologist, a doctor of laws 
in everything but title, a politician, a hater 
of the existing form of government, a con- 
spirator against it in words, a devout and 
lettered theologian, a reformer, an accom- 
plished courtier, and a hundred other 
things ; when, after all, he was something 
at least as great as all these fine attributes 
of man, — a poet. In spite of all protes- 
tations to the contrary, it is becoming 
more and more evident to the students 
of Shakespearean criticism that the syn- 
thetical, inexplicable, divine poetic gift 
that made Shakespeare what he was is the 
one factor which most of the learned 
gentlemen — including Father Bowden, 
Professor Furnivall, Herr Vehse — dim 
somewhat in analyzing the lesser qual- 
ities. He is in love with truth and 
beauty, like all poets ; and the higher the 
quality of the poet, the more he is in love 



56 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

with truth and beauty. Writers like 
Father Bowden, Mr. Simpson, and cer- 
tainly most of the men who make Shake- 
speare's genius depend on his religion, 
seem unwilling to leave much to God. 
They do not realize that what we call 
genius is beyond all explanation ; but 
their reading of great poets, particularly 
of this great poet, ought to have taught 
them that the more universal a poet is, 
the easier it is for lesser minds to put 
what they like into his works. And they 
seem to forget, too, that history seen from 
the modern point of view is an illusion, 
so far as it may be supposed to be a guide 
to the meaning of the past. This is less 
true of Father Bowden than of most 
others ; but sometimes he appears to lose 
sight of the difference in the attitude of 
Catholics before the Council of Trent and 
their attitude to-day. It is a truism to 
say that St. Thomas, in the spirit of the 
Church, made the great synthesis. And 
yet many of us who accept this as a fact 
beyond argument talk and write as if 
the essences he fixed, and which perme- 
ate all that is best in art and literature, 
were invented by him. Similarly we find 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 57 

Father Bowden and Mr. Simpson noting 
elementary moral truths uttered by Shake- 
speare, which were acknowledged by pa- 
gans as well as Christians, and which are 
as evident in Homer as in Dante, as quasi 
protests against the doctrines of the Ref- 
ormation. In the first chapter of "The 
Religion of Shakespeare," for instance, 
Father Bowden declares that the leading 
idea in the famous lines in " As You Like 
It" — 

Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks. 
Sermons in stones, and good in everything — 

" is in its very essence opposed to the 
fundamental doctrine of the Reformation, 
as we have already shown." Father Bow- 
den has already said : 

" There are, broadly speaking, two views of 
nature, — the Catholic and the Protestant. 
What may be the Protestant view at the pres- 
ent day is perhaps difficult to determine, for 
Protestantism is fluctuating and manifold. But 
the Protestantism of Shakespeare's day was 
clearly defined. Nature was a synonym for 
discord. Man through his fall was in essential 
discord with God ; the lower world was in dis- 
cord with man. The Redemption had brought 



58 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

no true healing of this rupture ; for salvation 
was wrought not by internal restoration, but by 
mere outward acceptance. Saint and sinner 
were intrinsically alike. In saint as in sinner 
there was, to use the words of a reformed con- 
fession of faith, ' an intimate, profound, inscrut- 
able, and irreparable corruption of the entire 
nature^ and of all the powers, especially of the 
superior and principal powers of the soul.' . . . 
The mind of man has grown darkened ; he can- 
not see in creatures the beauty of Him that made 
them. The will of man has grown hardened ; 
he cannot see in creatures the beauty and good- 
ness of the Lord. Creatures can teach man 
no moral lesson, for man is no longer a moral 
being. His freedom of will has left him; his 
instincts are all towards vice. Nature can only 
find food for his passions and minister to the 
vices of his fallen state." ^ 

Now, there can be no question that 
Shakespeare was out of sympathy with 
this gloomy doctrine ; but that it repre- 
sented the spirit of the Elizabethan re- 
form, or that it was held by anybody in 
England, except the Puritans, is doubtful. 
At any rate, it was not exposed in the 
poetry of Wyatt, of Sidney, of Spenser, 

* The Religion of Shakespeare, p. 12, 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 59 

and they were certainly Protestants in the 
Elizabethan sense of the word. Nothing 
can be more opposed to it than the senti- 
ment of the splendid " Epithalamium " of 
Spenser. The Duke senior*s speech, in 
" As You Like It," might have been 
uttered by Horace or Theocritus, voicing 
the better paganism, — only we should 
have, perhaps, to re-define the word 
" good." Adding illustrations, Father 
Bowden quotes as against the revised 
Protestantism of the times : 

Their lips were four red roses on a stalk, 

Which in their summer beauty kissed each other. ^ 

This is quite as much pagan as Catholic, 
— in fact, our early Christian ancestors 
borrowed the symbolic rose from the 
pagans, and Milton, Puritan of the Puri- 
tans, might have used this metaphor with- 
out being reasonably accused of leaning 
towards the Pope. In " Cymbeline " 
Guiderius says : 

For notes of sorrow out of tune are worse 
Than priests and fanes that lie. 

1 Richard III, Act IV, Sc. 3. 



6o THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

And this, humanely speaking, is very fine 
and impassioned. But Father Bowden 
seriously adds : 

^' It is impossible to suppose that Shakespeare 
really held that the singing of a Miserere a trifle 
too sharp was worse than a hypocritical priest- 
hood and a false religion. Read ironically, the 
text means, ' You talk of the lying priests and 
their lying temples ; I hold your vile psalm- 
singing to be ten times worse.' " ^ 

Observe the effect of searching through 
the most vital of poets, note-book in 
hand, to prove a cause. It means chronic 
Philistinism. If Shakespeare wrote that 
very human and exaggerated and pathetic 
and sweet speech of Guiderius to be 
" read ironically," he deserves to be de- 
prived of the honor of having written it. 
He wrote it as a poet, not as a polemist ; 
he had no thought of the Miserere, but 
only of a strain, nameless, full of grief and 
longing. One might as well read into 
Ophelia's artless speech to the Queen 
Mother all sorts of insults to Queen 
Elizabeth, or into Laertes' defiance of 

1 Page 370. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 6i 

the priest an attack on the Catholic rules 
of Church discipline in England. In a 
word, Shakespeare was a poet, and of his 
time, which was not a Lutheran, Calvinis- 
tic, or Puritan time at all, whatever the 
Lutherans in their confession of faith 
may have said. But both Father Bow- 
den and Mr. Simpson will have it that 
Shakespeare was the one Catholic poetic 
dramatist in a time permeated with gen- 
eral philosophic and popular opposition 
to Catholic teaching, and hence these 
strange and stretched extensions of poetry 
to fit the bed of prose. Not so very- 
long ago, when it was announced that the 
last words Lord Tennyson had read on 
his death-bed were those of the spoken 
duo between Guiderius and Arviragus, 
some of us regretted that they were not 
those of the " Miserere ** or " Dies Irae," 
and felt that the greatest lyrist of our cen- 
tury had died as a poet rather than as a 
Christian. But when it suits our pur- 
pose, we insinuate that Guiderius had the 
song of faith in his breast when what he 
had in his mind, on his lips, was the 
beautiful chant, as much pagan as Chris- 
tian, but not rejected of Christianity : 



62 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Gui. Fear no more the heat o' the sun. 

Nor the furious winter's rages ; 

Thou thy worldly task hast done. 

Home art gone and ta'en thy wages; 
Golden lads and girls all must. 
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 

Fear no more the lightning-flash, 
Arv. Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone; 

Gut. Fear not slander, censure rash; 
Arv. Thou hast finish' d joy and moan : 
Both. All lovers young, all lovers must 

Consign to thee and come to dust. 

I trust that the readers of this article 
will understand that I am entirely in sym- 
pathy with the authors of " The Religion 
of Shakespeare'* in their belief that the 
Thomist philosophy permeates Shake- 
speare's plays and sonnets. The poet was 
the result of previous years and the in- 
terpreter of inherited philosophy and 
ethics ; and the results of Christian phi- 
losophy and ethics could not be driven 
from Elizabethan or Jacobean schools, 
homes, and churches by acts of Parlia- 
ment. They were of the essential life of 
the people, and they are of the essential 
life of the people still, as the study of 
contemporary English literature will show. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 63 

The poet or the novelist to-day — the 
publicist, in fact, governed by English 
traditions — accepts the same system of 
ethics, derived from the teaching of the 
Church, as Shakespeare used for a ground- 
work to his marvels. The ethics of 
Shakespeare are the ethics of Tennyson ; 
and Swinburne and Thomas Hardy ac- 
knowledge their existence by revolting 
from them. The mistake that modern 
writers. Catholic and non-Catholic, make 
is in fancying that the influence of the 
philosophy and ethics wrought into the 
very tissue of national life by the Church 
could be destroyed by the political defi- 
ance of Henry VIII, or even by years of 
Erastianism. The sacramental ideal has 
lived in the hearts of the English people 
like the vital germ in the wheat grains 
found in the Egyptian mummy cases. 
Concerning Shakespeare it must be re- 
membered that he, as a dramatist, ap- 
pealed directly to the people ; he was 
dependent on the favor of the people. 
If his audience had found " Hamlet " 
dull, or " Measure for Measure " alien to 
their ideas of morality, all the genius of 
the author and all the talent of the actors 



64 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

at the Globe would not have saved it. 
But we find that no dramatic author of 
the later Elizabethan and earlier Jacobean 
time was more popular than Shakespeare. 
How does Father Bowden reconcile this 
fact with the statement that he was not of 
his time ? If any man must be of his 
time, it is the dramatic author, who is 
never the master, but always, more or 
less, the slave of his public. Again, it 
must be remembered that the party of 
reform — in the sense in which Father 
Bowden defines the word — did not fre- 
quent the theatres. If Shakespeare had, 
being a Cathohc at heart, written plays 
against the sentiment of those who ac- 
claimed him, he would not have been able 
to build New Place or to assume his 
arms at Stratford as a country gentle- 
man. 

One of the surprising tenets of the 
school of critics to which Father Bowden, 
and so many others who draw deductions 
from Shakespeare absolutely opposed to 
his, belong, is that every man who writes 
must borrow a great thought directly from 
some other man. As if great thoughts 
were not in the air, as if the receptive 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 65 

and comprehensive mind did not live 
daily by assimilating noble things that 
are like flashes from the facets of the 
truth. Father Bowden makes a strong 
point against the methods of his own 
school of interpretation when he re- 
marks : 

" Does Hamlet say that there is nothing 
good or evil [in the physical order] but thinking 
makes so ? This idea is borrowed from the 
pantheist Giordano Bruno, who was in London 
from 1583 to 1586, just after Shakespeare's 
arrival there, and who denied the existence [in 
the moral order] of either absolute good or evil. 
Again, Hamlet's praise of Horatio's equanim- 
ity, which ' takes buffets and rewards with 
equal thanks,' proves Shakespeare a stoic. The 
poet's desire for the immortality of his verse in 
praise of his beloved indicates his disbelief in 
the immortality of the soul. His phrase ' the 
prophetic soul of the world ' proves his pan- 
theism, and the duty of meeting necessities as 
necessities clearly shows his determinism." ^ 

As a dramatist at the moment of the 
whitest heat of the imagination, Shake- 
speare does not represent himself or his 
belief in the utterances of his characters. 

^ The Religion of Shakespeare, p. 20. 
5 



66 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Hamlet, in his " damned, vacillating 
state," ^ was a pantheist and almost every- 
thing by turns, and Horatio says : " I 
am more an antique Roman than a 
Dane." 

When Father Bowden insists in guar- 
anteeing Shakespeare's orthodoxy by the 
speeches of his creatures, or fails to see 
that it is only the existence of the solid 
but generally unexpressed dogmas behind 
them in the author's mind that make the 
never-absent contrast of the eternal with 
the evanescent, he becomes as unconvinc- 
ing as Professor Dowden and Herr Vehse 
are when they draw their inferences. 
Commenting on Shakespeare's — 

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men. 
And Death once dead, there 's no more dying then, 

Furnivall says : " This dramatic voice, of 
course, does not always speak his own 
beliefs, yet such is his ' saturation with 
the Bible story,' so thoroughly does it 
' seem as much part of him as his love of 
nature and music, bubbling out of him at 
every turn,* that I, with some reluctance, 

1 Tennyson's " Supposed Confessions of a Second- 
rate Sensitive Mind." 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 67 

conclude that he held, in the main, the 
orthodox layman's belief of his day." ^ 

But the orthodox belief of the day was 
not Puritanism or Calvinism or Luther- 
anism, as Father Bowden would have us 
believe. What it was — what it could 
not help being, when we recall the fact 
that the mind and the temperament of 
men have never been changed in a few 
years, except by a miracle — is 5hown by 
evidence of Shakespeare's plays and son- 
nets ; it is shown by the undercurrent 
in Spenser and Sidney. Says Professor 
Halleck:^ 

" Shakespeare was extremely fortunate in 
having parents who could neither read nor 
write ; we can, therefore, be safe in assuming 
that the greater part of whatever information his 
parents had, came from the exercise of their own 
senses in the experience of life. Their senses 
would be the keener because they could not 
rely on books. . . . Herein lies the reason why 
Shakespeare was fortunate in having intelligent 
parents who were not bookish. By force of 
example they taught him to rely largely on his 
senses for information." 

1 Preface to Leopold edition. 

2 The Education of the Central Nervous System, 
p. 182. 



68 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

And, with acute senses and an imagination 
exquisitely susceptible, no human crea- 
ture born and reared in Warwickshire 
could fail to accept the evidences of joy in 
life. Rural England taught the old faith 
at every turn, as it does in Oxford to-day, 
as it does in Stratford to-day. The re- 
form was a bookish thing, though it was 
not very much helped by the knowledge 
the young Elizabethans gathered from the 
Catechism, the Psalter, the Book of Com- 
mon Prayer, or the Small Catechism. 
Ritualism, reaction against barrenness of 
worship, must always exist in a country 
where the Gothic spire and the ruined 
monastery and the legend of the Sacra- 
mental Presence are everywhere. And 
all the beauty of the " ruined choirs " and 
the hidden God were very near to the boy 
Shakespeare and other boys who were not 
sodden or perverted. 

But no ; everything must be drawn 
from books ! Shakespeare must have 
studied scholastic philosophy ; he must 
have read St. Thomas, or Giordano Bruno, 
or St. Augustine, or Lucretius, or Dante, 
or Lorenzo Valla. Nothing whatever is 
left to that power of knowing the false 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 69 

from the true, that faculty of assimilating 
the beautiful, that quality of expressing it 
beautifully, which is the gift of God to the 
poet, and which makes him different from 
other men. Ethics that are as old as 
Homer, truths common to all men, — 
though sometimes blurred, — which have 
been the salt of the world since Cain broke 
the unwritten law against murder, flashes 
of poetic fire that illumined Isaiah, are at- 
tributed to Christian authors, as if Christ 
had come, not to fulfil, but to invent. Let 
us remark that St. Thomas prefers, in one 
noble passage on the joys of contempla- 
tion, to invoke the authority of Aristotle : 
" Comme s'il voulait indiquer les origines 
philosophiques de sa doctrine, et le lien 
qui la rattache en morale comme en meta- 
physique a la tradition peripateticienne." ^ 
Now, in " The Religion of Shake- 
speare,'' and similar books by partisans, 
the example of St. Thomas is ignored. 
There seems to be the underlying infer- 
ence that philosophy was discovered by 
St. Paul, and poetry began with St. Peter. 
This view narrows and cramps us ; at 

1 Philosophic de St. Thomas d'Aquin, par Charles 
Jourdain. 



70 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

best, it irritates the scholar, and makes 
the student, bHnded for the moment, 
when he can remove the hood from his 
eyes, accuse us of clouding the truth. 
That rehgion builds upon the natural 
cannot be lost sight of without killing 
the vital quality in him that teaches. 

In discussing " Measure for Measure," 
by far the noblest of all tragi-comedies. 
Father Bowden, who so acknowledges, 
talks a great deal about the " teaching " 
of Shakespeare : he is a casuist, in the 
best sense ; he understands that the truth 
must not always be told ; he rejects the 
principles of Protestantism that "each 
man is the sole interpreter of the moral 
law, as of revealed doctrine, and human 
engagements are supreme, the oath or 
word must be kept at any cost " ; he 
accepts the lawfulness of " the use of 
equivocation when the truth is unjustly 
demanded." Says the Duke, in " Meas- 
ure for Measure" : 

Pay with falsehood false exacting. 

According to Father Bowden's inter- 
pretation, it is remarkable that in this 
matter " he should be asain found in 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 71 

defending the unpopular and Catholic 
side." We all know the plot of " Meas- 
ure for Measure," and we know the trick 
by which Isabella saves herself, — a kind 
of theatrical trick as common in sixteenth- 
century comedy as the long-lost-brother 
incident was in the melodrama of the 
earlier nineteenth. The Duke advises 
it ; but on the stage an act which needs 
defence must always be defended in accord- 
ance with the sympathy of the auditors. 
As to the action of the Duke himself, it 
can only be excused, even as a dramatic 
expedient, by quoting the sophism that 
" the end justifies the means." The 
Duke, as we all remember, masquerades 
as Friar Lodowick, and in his last speech 
he says of Mariana : 

Love her, Angelo : 
I have confessed her, and I know her virtue. 

It is difficult to understand how this 
sort of "teaching" can be turned to 
account by the most violent partisan of 
Shakespeare's didacticism. But probably 
Father Bowden does not include the as- 
sumption by the Duke of sacerdotal power 
when he says : 



72 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

"That is, the truth and fidelity we owe to 
some, may be at times only discharged by veil- 
ing truth to others. This is so, of course, as 
regards the professional secrets of lawyers, physi- 
cians, priests ; but though recognized and acted 
on in practice, the theory of equivocation was 
denounced in Shakespeare's time as Jesuitical 
and vile, as much as it is now." ^ 

But if we are to hold men who wrote 
for the theatre responsible for the intrigues 
on which they hung their dramatic action ; 
if we are to read profound meanings in 
time-worn stage tricks, what becomes of 
the "teaching" of Calderon and Lope de 
Vega, of whose practical adherence to the 
faith there can be no doubt? Both these 
great Spanish playwriters used situations 
which, taken seriously and with their in- 
tentions not kept in view, are, to say the 
least, offensive to pious ears. The dram- 
atists of the romantic period took the 
material that lay near them, material that 
had become traditional in many cases. In 
" As You Like It," for instance, the palm 
tree and the threatening serpent, not found 
in English forests, are mere " properties," 
as the sudden conversion of Orlando's 

1 Page 37. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 73 

wicked brother is a stage convention. 
Your true romanticist does not trouble 
himself about facts ; he uses them, as 
an artist uses pigments, for their artistic 
values. Schiller makes Elizabeth and 
Mary Stuart meet, to the end that a great 
dramatic effect may be produced, though 
there is no record of such a meeting. And 
Sir Walter Scott's love for romantic effects 
leads him to invent passages in the lives 
of the great which are not found in accu- 
rate chronicles. Sir Walter, like Shake- 
speare, has always the ethical background, 
but his characters cannot usually be quoted 
as representing himself or the morality 
which he revered and practised. 
Imogen, in " Cymbeline," says: 

If I do lie and do 
No harm by it, though the gods hear, I hope 
They 'II pardon it. 

Pisanio thinks : 

Thou bidd'st me to my loss ; for true to thee 
Were to prove false, which I will never be. 
To him that is most true. 

And, later : 

Wherein I am false I am honest ; not true, to be true. 



74 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

George Brandes, whose method of in- 
terpretation is similar to Father Bowden's, 
draws from " Cymbeline " — which they 
both admire, ahnost revere — this infer- 
ence, having quoted the lines of Pisanio : 

" That is to say, he lies and deceives because 
he cannot help it ; but his character is none the 
worse — nay, all the better — on that account. 
He disobeys his master, and thereby merits his 
gratitude; he hoodwinks Cloten, and therein he 
does well." ^ 

Nowhere in Shakespeare^s plays do we 
find a character bereft of free will, for 
even his fools have the power to choose 
between good and evil ; and if we take 
Autolycus, Shakespeare's chief rascal in 
"A Winter's Tale," as a fair example, we 
do not find that character is improved by 
deceit. 

" Imogen," Mr. Simpson tells us,^ "is 
the ideal of fidelity, and of religious 
fidelity, — to be deceived neither by the 
foreign impostor who comes to her in 
her husband's name, nor by the en- 
nobled clown who offers himself under 

1 William Shakespeare : a Critical Study, by Brandes, 
p. 338, vol. ii. 

^ The Religion of Shakespeare, p. 369. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 75 

the Queen's protection." Now, listen to 
George Brandes's view of " Cymbeline," 
and you will observe that Father Bowden, 
Mr. Simpson, and George Brandes are 
bound to put Shakespeare in the right, no 
matter what he does. Mr. Brandes con- 
tinues, a propos of Pisanio : 

" In the same way all the nobler characters 
fly in the face of accepted moral laws. Imogen 
disobeys her father and braves his wrath and 
even his curse, because she will not renounce 
the husband of her choice. So, too, she after- 
wards deceives the young man in the forest by 
appearing in male attire and under an assumed 
name — untruthfully, and yet with a higher 
truth, calling herself Fidele, the faithful one. 
So, too, the upright Belarius robs the King of 
both his sons, but thereby saves them for him 
and for the country ; and during their whole 
boyhood he puts them off for their own good, 
with false accounts of things. So, too, the 
honest physician deceives the Queen, whose 
wickedness he has divined, by giving her an 
opiate in place of a poison, and thereby baffling 
her attempt at murder. So, too, Guiderius acts 
rightly by taking the law into his own hand by 
answering Cloten's insults by killing him at 
sight and cutting off his head. He thus, with- 
out knowing it, prevents the brutish idiot's in- 
tended violence to Imogen." 



76 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

It must be evident that the conduct 
of life, in these principles and practices, 
would be disastrous. But Shakespeare, 
writing for the theatre, strung his effects 
of character and situation on these cross 
purposes, which it is absurd to take seri- 
ously. Why not say frankly that Imogen, 
like most people, Christian or pagan, in 
a difficulty, was tempted to tell a falsehood, 
and she hoped that " the gods " might 
look upon it as a " white lie," as she in- 
tended to do no harm by it. What had 
Shakespeare, in the heat of imagination, to 
do with the " doctrine of equivocation " ? 
As Imogen had a good intention, the 
result seemed to justify it, and it helped 
the plot of the play. We may be quite 
sure that the Elizabethans did not worry 
themselves, as they listened, about the 
theory by which Mr. Simpson would per- 
haps excuse it. Similarly, " the ethics of 
intention," of which George Brandes talks, 
would have doomed Guiderius, in the 
eyes of the audience, had his kilHng of 
Cloten not been necessary to the plot of 
" Cymbeline." 

The critic who would make sermons 
out of songs is becoming a weariness to 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 77 

those who know that the great poet is 
seldom a conscious preacher, while the 
great preacher is very often a poet. That 
Shakespeare's dramas are permeated with 
Christian ethics and with the philosophy 
of Christianity, there can be no doubt. It 
could not have been otherwise, for these 
were his inheritance, and he was too fine 
to reject them. They were his inherit- 
ance as they have been the inheritance of 
Sir Walter Scott and Tennyson, Thack- 
eray and Longfellow ; but he was nearer 
the source. And he, having God-given 
genius of the highest order, turned, by 
virtue of that gift, to the light, as all great 
poets have done in their highest moments. 
That he represented the majority of his 
countrymen we know, since four-fifths of 
the English nation were Catholic at heart. 
As to his personal belief, it is plain, from 
the number of repetitions of the same eth- 
ical formulae on the lips of certain char- 
acters, — who are, first of all, human and 
dramatic, — that he was the child of the 
Church, whose ethical traditions the Eng- 
lish of to-day accept without acknowledg- 
ing such acceptance. As to his practice, 
who of us can judge of what was demanded 



78 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

of the Catholic in the time of EHzabeth ? 
Puritanism, gaining ground, thrust his 
dramas from the stage/ " It was a fanat- 
icism which had found its way into his own 
home," writes George Brandes. Stratford 
was a stronghold of Puritanism. His wife 
and daughters, Susannah and Judith, were 
of the sect. "Judith," Brandes adds, 
" was as ignorant as a child. Thus he 
[Shakespeare] must pay the penalty of his 
long absence from home and his utter 
neglect of the education of his girls." 

And this may help to explain the loss 
of all domestic records which, had Shake- 
speare's daughters not been ignorant, might 
have solved some of the questions that 
now force the professional interpreters to 
draw upon their inner consciousness. 

1 Page 391. 



SOME PEDAGOGICAL USES OF 
SHAKESPEARE 



SOME PEDAGOGICAL USES 
OF SHAKESPEARE 

THE use of the works of Shake- 
speare in schools and colleges is 
general. No school of impor- 
tance in the United States omits the study 
of the plays from its curriculum, and the 
entrance examinations for admittance to 
the colleges always include questions 
concerning the sources, history, and 
development of these masterpieces. An 
examination of the courses in nineteen 
representative colleges or universities — 
these names seem in most cases to be 
valued as interchangeable — shows that 
Shakespeare is analyzed as carefully and 
interpreted as reverently as Dante is 
analyzed and taught in the schools of 
Italy. In England neither Oxford nor 
Cambridge neglects him, and in France a 
great change has taken place since Vol- 
taire sneered at him ; for very recently 
M. Jules-Claretie dared to put the names 



82 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

of Moliere and Shakespeare together and 
to bind them with an exaggerated phrase 
from the elder Dumas, - — " Shakespeare 
was the greatest of creators, except 
God." 

The plays of this masterly interpreter 
long ago found their way into the gram- 
mar schools, and gradually they are get- 
ting into the primary schools. Teachers 
of experience, who are either the best or 
the worst specialists in the child mind, 
are divided as to the time when Shake- 
speare shall be introduced into the lower 
schools. But those whose experience has 
not hardened them are in favor of intro- 
ducing good literature as soon as possible, 
and they fortify themselves with some 
reasons ; and one of the best of these 
reasons is that fine taste in literature can- 
not be too early formed. Another reason, 
almost as good, is that the imagination, 
that faculty of the soul most neglected in 
education, should be directed and culti- 
vated. We are cultivating the power of 
observation, more or less intelligently, by 
means of the " object lesson." We, how- 
ever, are by no means in advance of that 
utilitarian school which Miss Edgeworth, 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 83 

Madame de Genlis, and Mrs. Barbauld 
represented over a hundred years ago. 
Not that we should esteem it an honor to 
be " advanced," but to have attained the 
best, whether the best have been reached 
before or not. Those who can recall 
Mrs. Barbauld's " Evenings at Home," 
in which the justly esteemed conversation 
called ** Eyes and No Eyes" occurs, and 
Mrs. Marcet's " Tales of Political Econ- 
omy," are quite willing to accept the 
practical conclusions that come from 
Hoifding's assertion, that "everywhere 
where there is development, later events 
are conditioned by earlier"^; or with 
Professor Halleck's, that " if brain cells 
are allowed to pass the plastic stage with- 
out being subjected to the proper stimuli 
or training, they will never fully develop." 
Everybody, whether a student of the 
child mind or not, will go further with 
Mr. Halleck, and agree that " the majority 
of adults have many undeveloped spots 
in their brains." There is a tendency on 
the part of the educated theorist to attrib- 
ute nearly all the undeveloped spots to 

1 The Education of the Central Nervous System, by 
Reuben Post Halleck. The Macmillan Company. 



84 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

the lack of practice of the faculty of 
observation. Many of these undeveloped 
spots are doubtless due to the lack of 
practice because of the lack of opportunity 
for practice. Shakespeare's marigold and 
Wordsworth's primrose are of no mental 
stimulating value to a man who has never 
seen either the English flowers or those 
which we approximate to them in our 
country. On the other hand, the Philis- 
tine by the river's brim who sees only the 
primrose as a golden-yellow flower, with 
kidney-shaped leaves and a calyx of five 
to nine petal-like sepals, growing in the 
marsh or by the river, does not think with 
aglow of Shakespeare's Mary-buds: 

Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings. 

And Phoebus 'gins arise. 
His steeds to water at those springs 

On chaliced flowers that lies; 
And winking Mary-buds begin 

To ope their golden eyes : 
With everything that pretty is. 

The difference, after all, between the 
average man, capable of enjoying only 
what he sees, — Matthew Arnold's 
" homme moyen sensuel," — and the 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 85 

man who enjoys intensely what he does 
not see with his physical eyes, is not in 
the lack of training of the power of 
observation, but in the training of the 
power of imagination. Observation alone 
cannot make a poet, — though later, 
Shakespeare and Tennyson owed much 
to the faculty of seeing keenly, — nor can 
it make the man of science, who becomes 
great in proportion to his unconscious 
skill in the management of what we call 
imagination. 

The purpose of this essay is not to 
make a plea for the cultivation of this 
faculty by teachers ; for in the breaking 
up of various pedagogical systems, experi- 
mental and empirical, the experienced 
teacher has learned the need of it, though 
even in religious schools, where the sym- 
bols of Christianity are constant stimuli 
to the imagination, teachers are not always 
sufficiently alert to apply the psychological 
processes of the Church to the develop- 
ment, the free development, of the soul. 
The purpose of this essay is to consider 
the means of carrying the study of the 
best and most subtle works of Shake- 
speare through all the courses of school 



86 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

and college and university, in the Ameri- 
can sense of the terms, and to give reasons 
why this should be done. 

It is the business of education to de- 
velop all the faculties of the soul, " the 
soul being, in some sense, everything." 
The limitations of this business are due, 
as a rule, to the gradual atrophy of the 
perception of the teacher who fancies that 
he has reached conclusions where he has 
only attained a condition of growth ar- 
rested; who seizes theories the seeming 
novelty of which offers an apparent support 
to his paralyzed hands. The develop- 
ment of the imagination applied to spirit- 
ual things is common in religious schools, 
for the symbols that show the relations of 
the natural and supernatural are every- 
where. The sense of sight receives the 
impression of the suffering figure on the 
cross, common sense centralizes it, and 
the imagination, trained religiously, con- 
serves, colors, treasures, systematizes the 
impression. Thus the spiritual sense is 
cultivated day by day, hour by hour, and 
all the faculties of the soul are directed 
toward a fuller richness of faith. There is 
no play of fancy about these object lessons, 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 87 

they appeal to no intermediate quality be- 
tween the imagination and the judgment 
— they satisfy both. 

It is often a matter of wonder that 
many persons who have what we call 
" the spiritual sense " highly cultivated 
have little perception of the beauties of 
music, art, literature, or architecture, ex- 
cept when these arts are directly appHed 
to the service of religion. Conversely, we 
have even a greater number whose per- 
ception of beauty in nature or art is 
blunted the moment nature and art are 
taken into the service of religion ; they 
have neither the gift of faith nor has the 
spiritual sense been cultivated. That one 
may exist without the other, experience 
abundantly shows. 

Let it be admitted that one of the duties 
of the teacher is to cultivate and direct 
the imagination, and it ought to follow 
that he cannot begin too soon. It fol- 
lows, too, that he ought to put within the 
reach of the pupil such literature as will 
lay the foundation of taste and culture at 
the earliest possible moment. It would 
be folly to attempt to teach philosophy 
to the very young, because the study of 



88 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

philosophy demands qualities that are lack- 
ing in the minds of the very young ; but the 
cultivation of taste and the enriching of 
the imagination have nothing to do with 
exact definitions and analyses and carefully 
distinguished processes. What literature 
is best for the young whose taste and 
power of conserving beautiful impressions 
are to be educated ? The sort of food 
offered to the children in the shape of 
little stories and articles that are literary 
prolongations of the odious patois called 
" baby talk," which must make the most 
intelligent infant hate his species at the 
very moment he enters life ; the at- 
tempts in letters of the atrophied adult 
mind to bring itself to the level of the 
child mind with the dew of God's morn- 
ing upon it ? By no means. The child 
should be prepared to accept the master- 
pieces. The child lives in his own world. 
His senses seem miraculously keen until 
he begins to believe that all lessons should 
be learned through books, and then the 
fatal art of printing is set up as a screen 
between him and the wonders of the 
world God has given him. One can no 
more hear Shakespeare without seeing the 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 89 

unspoiled imagination of the Stratford boy 
than one can read St. John without feeling 
that the sunsets of Patmos were finer than 
any known in western skies, — at least 
they were finer to him, whose imagination 
irradiated his observation. 

The value of the exercise of the faculty 
of observation, and of the process by 
which the imagination stores impressions, 
is nowhere more evident than in Shake- 
speare's plays. In "The Education of 
the Central Nervous System," a book 
of great value to teachers, Mr. Halleck 
says : 

" Every one ought to know how Shake- 
speare's senses were trained ; for in his sensory 
experience is to be found the formation of all 
those imperishable structures given to humanity 
by his heaven-climbing genius. 

"Two things are true of Shakespeare, — his 
senses had magnificent training; the stimuli of 
nature also had in him a wonderful central ner- 
vous system to develop. We shall not reach 
his heights, but if we have the proper training 
we shall ascend far higher than we could with- 
out it. If John Weakling can never make a 
Samson, that is no reason why John should not 
take proper gymnastic exercise, and develop his 
latent powers to the utmost. At their best they 



90 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

may be poor; at their worst they may keep him 
through life the slave of underlings. After go- 
ing through sensory training similar to Shake- 
speare's, any boy would be better fitted to cope 
with the world." ^ 

Mr. Halleck elaborates this passage by- 
many quoted extracts from Shakespeare's 
plays. Warwickshire is always present in 
the plays, for Shakespeare never gets out- 
side the sensory world of his boyhood, 
and from the treasury of that world come 
thousands of beautiful passages. The 
cowslip, with the drop of crimson in its 
cup, in " Cymbeline," the deer seen by 
Jaques from the roots of the oak, the 
action of the water as Ophelia is drawn 
down into the pool, the fairy-like bending 
of the pease-blossom, the moonlight on 
the wild thyme and the musk rose, the 
eglantine, the swan's nest in the great 
pond, the marsh marigold, the dog out 
in the cold in " Lear," the chill before 
the dawn in "Hamlet," the shadow of 
the hawk stilling the singing of the lesser 
birds, the "plain-song cuckoo gray," — a 
quick-eyed boy noted all these things in 

1 Page 171. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 91 

his walks in the most beautiful lanes and 
meadows and by the serenest river in 
England. They were stored in his im- 
agination, and when the time for expres- 
sion arrived they became like illuminated 
pictures in the text of a missal: 

'* Sleep no more ! 
Macbeth does murder sleep," the innocent sleep. 
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care. 
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath. 
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course. 
Chief nourisher in life's feast. 

And Portia's illustration : 

The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark 
When neither is attended ! 

On every page in the plays we find the 
impressions taken from life illuminated in 
this way, and certainly any training which 
may so make the ordinary things of earth 
glow through the conjunction of memory 
and imagination must be good for the stu- 
dent of any age. But the older a man 
grows, the less vivid become his impres- 
sions, so that the earlier the dramas of 
Shakespeare are used in the training of 
the central nervous system the better ; 
therefore a child ought to be interested 



92 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

as soon as possible in the study of nature 
and taught to absorb the beauty of the 
natural allusions in Shakespeare's plays. 
Shakespeare had seen the light clouds in 
the April sky on Stratford's fields, and 
the swan's feather float upon the swell 
at the turn of the tide. And, later, he 
read the story of Octavius Caesar and 
Antony. And when he came to repre- 
sent the parting of Octavia's husband and 
brother from her, he makes her say : 

My noble brother ! 

And, looking at her, Antony speaks : 

The April 's in her eyes : it is love's Spring, 
And these the showers to bring it on. 

Her tongue will not obey her heart, nor can 
Her heart inform her tongue, — the swan's down- 
feather. 
That stands upon the swell at full of tide. 
And neither w^ay inclines. 

The thing seen — the veriest trifle it 
may seem to be at the moment — be- 
comes part of the imagination, to give a 
new beauty to thoughts and emotions, and 
to make life full of suggestiveness. This 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 93 

synthesis between the sight of a thing and 
the power of assimilating it imaginatively 
is, often seems to be, a poetic gift, — in 
Shakespeare's case a supreme and inexpli- 
cable gift, according to the older philoso- 
phers ; an explicable gift according to the 
younger. It is his alone, and, because he 
possessed genius or had an unusually live 
brain, he has produced a new wonder for 
the world ; consequently, his powers of 
assimilation and of giving out the result 
of this assimilation were special with him, 
and, though they may be admired, they 
cannot be imitated. No student of the 
soul will deny this. For the pupil it is 
not a question of being a genius, but it 
is a question of getting the greatest pos- 
sible amount of contentment out of life. 
Men reach toward brightness and rest and 
change, as the small sapling in the dense 
wood straightens itself toward the light. 
Psychologists have said, over and over 
again, that it is the avocations not the 
vocations of life that make it pleasant; 
the means of higher pleasure cannot be 
too greatly multiplied, then, when life is 
young. The muscles of the body sleep, 
if not trained ; the sensory nerves and all 



94 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

the delicate ducts of the system require 
early training and constant activity as 
well. The memory becomes a precious 
collection of dynamic associations, if the 
art of observation and the results of this 
art are cultivated and pointed out. To 
store vital impressions and to so employ 
them that they may add to the joy of life 
is not the exclusive birthright of the poet, 
though a Shakespeare or a Wordsworth 
may possess it preeminently. To-day we 
are learning to use literature as an instru- 
ment in the education of the soul, not as 
an end ; as a means of development, not 
as an object to which the development 
of a few higher beings may tend. Every 
boy or girl may not feel Burns's thrill 
at the sight of a daisy, or Wordsworth's 
wonder that there should be any to whom 
a primrose should not give 

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears, 

or Tennyson's passionate desire to know 
the meaning of the flower in the crannied 
wall, or Bryant's pleasure in the yellow 
violet; but he may have at least a well- 
stored memory and be taught that there 
is an 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 95 

Hour 
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower, 

and that this hour, assimilated with human 
feeling or experience, may become a per- 
petual joy in the memory. 

The plays of Shakespeare, then, from 
the time that the child becomes capable of 
the process of connecting the things of 
nature with the emanations of the soul we 
call literature, are fine instruments ready 
for the work of the teachers. Charles 
Lamb, who loved much and suffered 
much, and who never lost the insight of 
a grown-up child, saw this ; and, seeing it, 
helped his sister to give the world the 
little classic called " Tales from Shake- 
speare." Says the preface of this delight- 
ful volume : 

" The plays of Shakespeare are enrichers of 
the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing 
from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson 
in all sweet and honorable thoughts and actions, 
to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, human- 
ity; for of examples teaching these vinues his 
pages are full." 

The preface hints at the necessity of 
keeping the plays from very young persons, 



96 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

and suggests that young gentlemen, who 
are permitted to range in their father's 
library at an earlier age than their sisters, 
should, after careful selection, read certain 
parts of the plays to them. The demand 
for supplementary reading in the primary 
schools has been answered by " The 
Beginner's Shakespeare." ^ Charles and 
Mary Lamb tried to retain the language 
of Shakespeare in their charming stories 
as much as possible, and their work 
remains as important in introduction to 
Shakespeare as that other classic, the 
"Tanglewood Tales," is to the Grecian 
myths. The acknowledgment of the 
value of Shakespeare's verse in develop- 
ing the faculty of imagination has pro- 
duced other carefully arranged editions for 
the young. The mere story, though it 
excited interest, was not enough, for the 
plots of Shakespeare's plays are only 
skeletons, and the arranged words of such 
dramas as can be adapted for the very 
young are needed in the cultivation of the 
imagination. No masterpieces of litera- 
ture are so well adapted for this end. 

^ Boston : Heath & Co. -, Home and School Classics. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 97 

In the higher schools into which 
Shakespeare's plays have been introduced 
by wise educators, and the necessity of 
their study as part of the English require- 
ments for entrance into colleges insisted 
upon, several very unpedagogical mis- 
takes have been made. The editions 
have been overburdened with notes, — 
some of them foolish or obvious and 
others so written as to avoid any expla- 
nation of real difficulties ; and the study 
of the metres has been almost entirely 
neglected. I am not speaking of that 
scientific study which would be a waste 
of time in secondary or high schools, but 
of that study for the purpose of culture 
which would add much to the enjoyment 
of the art of reading and develop the 
sense of rhythm. Elaborate notes on 
"Hamlet" or "Julius Caesar," for in- 
stance, have no pedagogical value in 
school or college courses. They satiate 
the interest and cut off all discussion. 
To delay the reading of a play in order to 
consider a note that tells the pupil of the 
Warwickshire origin of " conditioned " 
when that word is used in Act III, Scene 
2 of "The Merchant of Venice" or that 



98 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

"to pun'* in Act II, Scene i of "Troilus 
and Cressida" means in Warwickshire 
" to quilt, leather, or pound " a man 
severely, and to compare the Warwick- 
shire meaning with that of five other 
dialects, is simply to impede the move- 
ment of the drama. In many cases the 
aim of both the editor and the teacher 
seems to be to burden the memory with 
details of little moment compared with 
the broadening and elevating of the 
pupil's mind. The reading and study of 
Shakespeare ought to be not with the 
intention of inducing the student to accept 
conclusions, but to find conclusions for 
himself. In mathematics it is the process 
that is valuable to the pupil ; in logic it is 
the process too ; and in physical and 
chemical laboratories as well, the teacher 
and pupil often know what the results will 
be ; but the processes of the experiment 
are what the student must learn. The 
page overcrowded with answers to every 
possible question, the learned and the 
unlearned conjectures in passages which 
might safely be left to the student's own 
intuition, and the constant attempt to prej- 
udice in favor of a personal interpretation. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 99 

weary the attention and deaden the 
power of perception. The philology of 
the plays ought never to be neglected, 
but a too minute inquiry into it — espe- 
cially if the editor and the teacher do all 
the inquiring — is contrary to the axiom 
that the student, in all grades, should 
work for himself, with only such assistance 
as may clear his path without making it a 
royal road. 

In some of the high schools too many 
plays are read lazily and without due 
attention to the condition of English 
speech in the Elizabethan and Jacobean 
time. While minute philological details, 
merely memorized, are detrimental to the 
progress of the development of the stu- 
dent, certain important changes, particu- 
larly the gradual loss of the Old English 
inflections, ought to be pointed out and 
illustrated, as well as the various meanings 
which distinguish modern words from 
those of the same form used by Shake- 
speare and his contemporaries. It is 
very easy to do too much of this. The 
study of Shakespeare in secondary and 
high schools must be to the student a 
labor of love. The moment it becomes 

Lora 



100 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

perfunctory it ceases to be worth the 
effort. A good text, a glossary, a fac- 
simile of the First Folio, and an enthu- 
siastic teacher will work wonders. 

Students whose reading has been al- 
most incredibly limited will learn to get 
the best from " Hamlet " or " The Mer- 
chant of Venice," and, outside of the 
mental development, they will soon learn 
" by the feel," as it were, by the un- 
conscious refinement of taste that comes 
of familiar contact with masterpieces, to 
know the inferior literary production 
when they see it. A man or a woman 
brought up with " Hamlet " is not likely 
to speak of Marie Corelli as one of 
the elect. The purification of taste is a 
work not unworthy of the best-equipped 
teacher. The rustic boy, fresh from the 
plough, whose reading has been confined 
to rudimentary text-books and the country 
paper, if he be kept in close association 
with one of Shakespeare's best plays can- 
not fail to be so strengthened in taste and 
prejudiced in favor of luminousness, clean- 
ness, and beauty that he will neglect lesser 
things. I have observed that, from the 
boy of ten to the student of thirty, 



AND OTHER ESSAYS loi 

Shakespeare speaks to each according to 
his capacity. 

Of the hundreds of doctors* theses 
from the German universities Shakespeare 
furnishes the material for scores. At 
Oxford, even, and in the Cambridge 
Tripos, where one hardly expects to find 
an appeal to mere taste, he is important 
as a basis for historical and philological 
work ; in fact, into every department 
in practical pedagogy Shakespeare enters 
more and more ; but in the intermediate 
and undergraduate courses one of his 
chief values is that, properly assimilated, 
he stands in the way of that mental 
frivolity and dissipation which, while 
it demands the multiplication of nev/ 
books, is ruinous to all concentrated and 
consecutive thought. " The great relig- 
ious poets, the imaginative teachers of 
the heart, are never easy reading," Fred- 
erick Harrison says in "The Choice of 
Books." And Shakespeare, who is the 
first of the imaginative teachers, is not easy 
reading from the point of view of the mob 
that spends half a lifetime in ''sucking 
magazines and new poems." Frederick 
Harrison further says : 



102 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

" It is a true psychological problem, this nau- 
sea which idle culture seems to produce for all 
that is manly and pure in heroic poetry. The 
intellectual system of most of us in these days 
needs ' to purge and to live cleanly.' Only by 
a course of treatment shall we bring our minds 
to feel at peace with the grand, pure works of 
the world. To understand a great national poet, 
such as Dante, Calderon, or Goethe, is to know 
other types of human civilization, in ways in 
which a library of history does not sufficiently 
teach. The great masterpieces of the world are 
thus, quite apart from the charm and solace they 
give us, the master instruments of a solid 
education." 

Nobody pretends that Shakespeare^s 
plays are all great or all worthy of serious 
attention, or that they all have pedagogi- 
cal possibilities beyond the uses of their 
philology ; the greatest of them have 
defects, but these very defects are so 
personal, so natural, so much of the time, 
that even they may be made subjects for 
pregnant study. But when Shakespeare is 
noble he is supremely noble. His variety 
is infinite, and his power of stimulus and 
suggestion so strong that, once beloved, 
once even partially understood, he helps 
us to acquire that force of rejection which 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 103 

the modern reader, above all things, needs. 
The real teacher's motto is, " For the 
greater glory of God," and he groups 
together all beautiful and great things 
about his student beneath this motto. It 
is like the cross, as Ruskin saw it, in 
St. Mark's at Venice, — the great central 
fact. It is often borne in upon him, with 
an iteration that makes him desperate, 
how futile his efforts are against popular 
currents because in early life the pseudo- 
student's taste has not been directed. 
This taste is broad in the worst sense, 
and it accepts the road of the least resist- 
ance. It offers no obstacle to the vain, 
the frivolous, the philosophically untrue, 
or the sensuously destructive. Its de- 
lights are those of the dreamer, with no 
intellectual pilot. 

It seems to be forgotten that good taste 
is one of the surest tonics for moral think- 
ing. The teacher may talk as forcibly 
as Mr. Frederick Harrison has written 
on the value of the great books ; he 
may declare with passion that a few books 
are best, but the popular desire for 
easy reading — foi the book about books, 
for the thing talked about — will be too 



104 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

much for him. And yet, we all accept 
the truth of the maxim of St. Thomas, 
" Natura autem nulli deest in necessariis " ; 
and therefore the soul has its splendid 
auxiliary, the body. Why not admit that 
the education of the spiritual sense ought 
to have as auxiliary the education of its 
helper, good taste, at the earliest possible 
moment? The teacher needs all the as- 
sistance he can get from the soul of his 
pupil, and if the soul be prejudiced in 
favor of what is beautiful, his work be- 
comes one of progression. It is a truism 
to say that trailing clouds of glory should 
surround the young soul, and that its 
earthly guardians should, if possible, keep 
the knowledge of evil from it ; all the 
adepts in child study have said this a 
thousand times. 

Let us be practical about it ; and if 
we admit that good taste in art and litera- 
ture is a desirable aid to the seeing of 
that beauty which God gives us on earth, 
as a help to the knowledge of Him, 
why should we not, from the beginning 
of the child's school life, keep the evil 
of low aims from it? There should be 
no disputing about tastes, in the sense 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 105 

that there is, as regards truly great works, 
only one standard of taste ; and this 
standard should be tactfully applied. 
The atheist who would sneer at the 
Book of Job or Isaiah or the Apoca- 
lypse, from the point of view of literary 
beauty, would judge himself. Similarly, 
only a barbarian would attempt to displace 
Dante from the niche in which the univer- 
sal consensus has put him. But the man 
who admires the Bible or Dante without 
reading either or knowing of himself why 
they are great is a dumb, driven follower 
of beauty. While Shakespeare never 
touches the grandeur of the Apocalypse 
or the majesty of Dante, he remains as 
the finest interpreter of the heart that the 
world has ever known. The story of 
" The Merchant of Venice,'' full of the 
interest of romance when we are very 
young, becomes later a criticism of life, a 
treasure-house of philosophy, the tragedy 
of a soul and of a nation. It is the 
material, properly used, with which the 
teacher may work wonders for the solace 
of middle life, for the consolation of old 
age. In truth, if all the " Rhetorics " 
were taken away, and the teacher were to 



io6 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

use " Hamlet " or " King Lear " or " The 
Merchant of Venice " or " As You Like 
It," as physicists use materials in their 
laboratories, we should have clearer-headed 
men and women, very easily expressing 
themselves ; for, in English at least, 
there can be no rules of rhetoric capable 
of vitalized application which are not 
drawn from the practices of the masters. 
Dr. Rolfe has an admirable page on the 
teaching of elementary rhetoric by the- in- 
ductive method.^ Professor Rolfe says : 

" In the reading of poetry the essential prin- 
ciples and laws of versification may be taught, 
the pupil being made to deduce them for him- 
self from the poem before him ; ... it is the 
right time for learning what children of larger 
growth often fail to acquire. The young child 
never errs in the rhythmical rendering of Mother 
Goose, that classic of the nursery ; but adults 
and teachers, and sometimes even college pro- 
fessors, who have lost the childish sensitiveness 
to the music of verse, will often blunder in read- 
ing or reciting Shakespeare." 

Mr. Rolfe further indicates the use of 
those masterpieces in the teaching of 

1 The Elementary Study of English, by W. J. Rolfe, 
Litt. D. Harper & Bros. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 107 

elementary rhetoric. All young persons 
use tropes in daily conversation. 

" The small boy, who is so much given to 
similes that when he is hard up for a mere 
specific comparison he will say ' like anythi?ig^' 
making up in emphasis what the expression 
lacks in point and precision, will not be slow to 
recognize that sort of thing in the printed page 
if you call his attention to it. He will pick out 
the similes and metaphors as readily as the nouns 
and verbs, and explain the resemblances on 
which they are based, as easily as the syntax 

of subject and predicate To note and 

name these figures soon becomes a merely 
mechanical process — much like parsing, and 
as profitless ; but to see whether the figure is 
apt or expressive or beautiful, and to find out 
and explain why it is so, is a practical lesson in 
truth and criticism." 

The material for these exercises is sup- 
plied by any of the great plays of Shake- 
speare. No English author gives, ready 
at hand, such a wealth of objects on which 
to expend mental energy. The skilful 
teacher has long ago discarded the volume 
of "elegant extracts." It was Walter 
Savage Landor who, I think, said of 
somebody's sonnets that he did not like 



io8 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

his sentiment cut up into little patty pans. 
The book of " elegant extracts " may, as 
a rule, be classed with these mechanical 
sonnets. But " Macbeth," " King Lear," 
"Hamlet," "Julius Caesar," "The Tem- 
pest," " As You Like It " may be so 
used that they accompany the student 
through his whole life, perennially giving 
forth new means of enjoyment and culture. 
Who has not noticed the ease with 
which intelligent readers of Shakespeare 
acquire the inflections of his verse ? And 
when, bv practice, the metrical and rhyth- 
mical swing of his verse has become a 
thing of habit, a finer appreciation of all 
verse forms in English becomes no diffi- 
cult matter. It has been often remarked 
that, while the teaching of English oc- 
cupies so large a space in the catalogues 
of the intermediate schools, — all those 
above the rudimentary grades, — and in 
undergraduate university courses, a knowl- 
edge of the musical charm of English 
verse is exceedingly rare. The elocution- 
ists of the older days insisted that blank 
verse should be read as prose, and the 
prosier you made your cadences and 
the more redundant were your gestures. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 109 

the more satisfactory your elocution was 
supposed to be. The cunning music of 
Jaques's famous speech, beginning "All 
the world 's a stage," was lost, because it 
was understood that while it might be 
scanned in classes according to outworn 
Greek or Latin rules, its metre had no 
relation whatever to the uttering of it ; 
and so when the elocutionist, struggling 
to beat the five-accented Shakespearean 
iamb into dull monotony, spoke of the 
"whining schoolboy," he pointed to an 
imaginary satchel, and when he described 
the lover 

With a woeful ballad 
Made to his mistress' eyebrow, 

he touched his own, and only a very nice 
sense of propriety prevented him from an 
appropriate gesture when he alluded to 
the justice : 

In fair round belly with good capon lined. 

After many years it has been discovered 
that when a poet writes in verse he means 
to produce an effect through the ear, not 
only through the eye ; that when Shake- 
speare wrote in prose he fitted the form 
to the feeling, and that he intended that 



no THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

all his exquisite metrical interweaving of 
verse melody should be given by the only 
instrument capable of uttering them, — 
that speaking voice which the pedagogues 
too much neglect. To what better use 
can the scene between Lear (mad through 
pride, adulation-fed) and his daughters be 
put than in the training of the concealed 
qualities of the voice ? When a young 
v^oman can utter Cordelia's words, " So 
young, my lord, and true," with the sim- 
plicity and the musical flow that follows 
"so young, and so untender?" she has 
learned more than all the rules of scansion 
can teach her. 

It was my intention to touch on some 
further uses of Shakespeare in the art of 
pedagogy, especially where philology and 
history are concerned and analysis and 
comparison are so necessary ; but I find 
that I have already made this essay longer 
than I wished, — yet I have only slightly 
sketched processes which are with advan- 
tage applied to the works of the greatest 
of all English masters in literature. 



LYRISM IN SHAKESPEARE'S 
COMEDIES 



LYRISM IN SHAKESPEARE'S 
COMEDIES 

THERE is a great difference be- 
tween a comedy by Shakespeare 
and a comedy by Moliere. And 
this difference is not only the difference 
that must exist between a play written for 
Elizabethans, who went to the theatre de- 
pendent on a strong appeal to the imagi- 
nation, and people of the time of Louis 
XIV desiring to see life as it was reflected 
on the stage. The age of Elizabeth and 
the age of Louis XIV were very unlike. 
The mob that filled the pit of the Globe 
Theatre had little affinity with the cour- 
tiers who gathered at St. Cyr^ to listen 
to the "Esther" of Racine, to wonder 
whether the Count de Soissons was the 
original of the man who discovered that 
he had been talking prose all his life, and 
to insinuate that the model for Tartufe 

1 Letters of Madame de Sevigne, June 12, i68q ; 
Feb, zi, 1689. 

8 



114 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

was the Bishop of Autun.^ The real 
difference, however, lies in the fact that 
the plays of Moliere are comedies, pure 
and simple, while the most beautiful of 
Shakespeare's are lyrical extravagances. 
Speaking of Aristotle, Cardinal Newman 
says : " The inferior poem may, on his 
principle, be the better tragedy." A care- 
ful examination of any play of Moliere's 
and a comparison of it with the best 
comedies of Shakespeare will show that 
Shakespeare was, by all odds, a poet, while 
Moliere was not a poet at all, but, in the 
best sense, a comedian of the highest 
order. Leaving out the question as to 
the distinctly opposite views of life and 
their art taken by these men of genius, 
I may say that the essential difference 
between them is the difference between 
poetry and prose. And though prose 
may be not unmusical, yet it is never 
lyrical, and all the plays of Shakespeare, 
except in certain prosaic passages intro- 
duced consciously, are lyrical ; they are 

1 It must have been the enemies of Mgr. de Roquette 
who whispered this, for the real Tartufe was a certain 
M. Fertant. See ** La Vraie Fin dc Tartufe," Re-vue. 
Bleue^ May 13, 1899. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 115 

full of emotion, mood, feeling, the quality 
of aspiration, musically expressed. The 
music of the composer and the music 
of the poet are not the same, but they 
touch each other. The poet who lives 
in a musical time will set his cadences 
and pauses to the tunes he hears. The 
air is full of music, and the accent of 
familiar songs sets the mould for the 
metres of the bard. 

Shakespeare's time was the most musi- 
cal that England ever knew. The lute 
and the spinet were everywhere ; the 
madrigal and the glee so common that 
at any moment in the day voices were 
ready to join in them. " It was the 
Puritan,"^ George Brandes says, "who 
cast out music from the daily life of 
England. Spinets stood in the barbers' 
shops for the use of customers waiting 
their turn." Music tried to get back 
with the Restoration, as we see from 
the passionate devotion of both Evelyn 
and Pepys, to the part-songs, but it had 
gone out of the everyday existence of 
a people who after a while heard music 

^ William Shakespeare : A Critical Study, by George 
Brandes. The Macmillan Company, 1898. 



ii6 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

only as an exotic in the form of Italian 
opera. But before the Reformation and 
for a time after, all England sang. All 
the Elizabethan dramatists break into the 
lyrical strain, with more or less success, 
according to the fineness of their feeling 
and their ear. John Addington Symonds^ 
says that the lyrical element "pervaded 
all species of poetry in the Elizabethan 
age. . . . We then had a native school 
of composers, and needed not to know 
the melodies of other lands. Every house 
had its lute suspended on the parlor wall. 
In every company of men and women 
part-songs were sung." Shakespeare, the 
foremost expresser of his time, was the 
most lyrical, the most songful, of all 
its writers. Dramatic expression may be 
full and noble without the musical cadence 
accentuated, — without that extravagance 
of figures, that play of the fancy, that re- 
dundance of imaginative suggestion, that 
lark-like flight which is sustained lyri- 
cism. There are many such forms of 
noble dramatic expression in Shakespeare. 

1 The Lyrism of the English Romantic Drama. 
A Paper written for the Elizabethan Society of Toynbee 
Hall. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS u; 

The great scene between Hamlet and his 
mother is not lyrical, though it has the 
measured movement of metrical cadences. 
It does not suggest the chant, though it 
is intense to the finest degree. A drama 
may be lyrical in the noblest sense ; an 
ode must be lyrical in the noblest sense, 
though in our time we huve lost sight 
of the real meaning of lyrical and almost 
limited it to sweet songs of the type of 
which Tennyson gives us perfect speci- 
mens in " The Princess." 

It would be unnecessary to show that 
lyrism was one of the principal qualities 
of the Greek drama, and that, as Newman 
says, it was founded on no scientific prin- 
ciple ; " it was a pure recreation of the 
imagination, revelling without object or 
meaning beyond its own exhibition." ^ 
The belief that holds that there is a 
wide gulf between the classicism of 
Sophocles and the romantic lyrism of 
Shakespeare is unfounded. They were 
more akin than most of us imagine. 
While Racine and Corneille are nearer to 
Aristotle than Shakespeare, Shakespeare 

^ Poetry with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics, 



ii8 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

is nearer to Sophocles and Euripides 
than Racine and Corneille. The pres- 
ence of the declamatory, the eloquent 
quality, is evident in the French trage- 
dians, but seldom does the lyrical quality 
appear. There is always reticence, the 
restraint of feeling modulated by rigid 
rule, seldom .the imaginative, emotional 
outburst, put there by the author with- 
out regard to the action of the drama, 
and never the little song so metred that 
its every accent and pause suggest the 
combination of notes by which the com- 
poser will make it ready for his harp. 
When poetical expression is over-abundant 
and conveys the impression that it might 
be chanted, or sung, or even read to 
musical accompaniment, it is lyrical. 
Hamlet's 

Confess yourself to Heaven ; 
Repent what 's past: avoid what is to come, 

is not a lyrical cry ; nor is the Queen's 
outburst, 

O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain. 

But there is lyricism — so overstrained 
that it nearly becomes bombastic rhetoric 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 119 

— in the dialogue between Hamlet and 
Laertes at the grave of Ophelia, in the 
Queen's description of Ophelia's death, 
and in speech after speech in Richard II. 
For instance (Act III, Scene 2): 

Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand. 
Though rebels wound thee with their horses' hoofs ; 
As a long-parted mother with her child 
Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting. 
So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth. 
And do thee favours with my royal hands. 

If Moliere's ''L'Avare" and Gold- 
smith's "She Stoops to Conquer" are 
comedies, Shakespeare's " As You Like 
It," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," 
"The Tempest," and "The Winter's 
Tale" certainly are not; and "Love's 
Labour 's Lost " and "Twelfth Night" 

— in fact, all except "The Comedy of 
Errors " and " The Taming of the 
Shrew " are very defective ones. Dia- 
logue and dramatic interest and action, 
realism, constitute a comedy. How ex- 
travagant, how impossible, how undra- 
matic, how exquisitely lyrical in every 
sense is "As You Like It"! As for 
the characters v/hich have any hold on 



120 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

local reality, they are Elizabethans, though 
they live in No Man's Land. In essence, 
all except Oliver are universal. Music is 
everywhere in the atmosphere of the play. 
There are intervals of prose, like the 
expository conversation between Adam 
and Orlando, in the first act, and all the 
speeches until the shadow of the tyrant 
Duke falls upon the scene. There are 
hints of music, as if the violinists were 
trying their instruments, but the lyrical 
quality of the play is not shown until we 
enter the Forest of Arden. The sentiment 
of the forest permeates every line until 
Amiens begins to sing : 

Under the greenwood tree 

Who loves to lie with me. 

And turn his merry note 

Unto the sweet bird's throat. 
Come hither, come hither, come hither ; 

Here shall he see 

No enemy 
But Winter and rough weather. 

Then comes the chorus : 

Who doth ambition shun. 
And loves to live i' the sun. 
Seeking the food he eats. 
And pleased with what he gets. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 121 

Come hither, come hither, come hither ; 

Here shall he see 

No enemy 
But Winter and rough weather. 

There are many passages where the 
overwrought, high-strained appeal to 
the imagination seems to resemble the 
euphuistic affectation which Shakespeare 
ridiculed in Polonius and Osric, — the 
speeches at the grave in " Hamlet " are 
examples. In extenuation, it must be 
remembered that the theatre of Shake- 
speare was barren of all those accessories 
which force stage effects upon our sight 
to-day. There were no waving leaves, 
where shadows are cast by calcium lights 
upon tufts of grass, in the Globe or the 
Rose Theatre, at the end of the sixteenth 
century. At court the Queen's Master 
of the Revels, Edmund Tylney, could 
command scenic apparatus almost as 
splendid as Calderon used at the Palace 
of Buen Retiro. But the theatre of 
Shakespeare, where the royal masques 
were not given, was forced to appeal 
through the ear rather than the eye. 

A boy acted Rosalind or Ophelia, Per- 
dita or Juliet, and the fairies in "A 



122 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Midsummer Night's Dream " were rosy- 
cheeked urchins, more suggestive of roast 
beef and Yorkshire pudding than moon- 
light and cobwebs. Most of us more 
enjoy a play of Shakespeare's read in 
quietness than presented to us subject 
to all the accidents of theatrical realism. 
This is because Shakespeare left nothing 
to such accidents. With no scenery and 
sometimes not even a screen, the sides of 
his platform occupied by loungers, with- 
out the means of changing the effect from 
light to darkness, he is obliged to force 
the illusion by the imaginative powers of 
the text. He cannot keep the expres- 
sions of his characters down to the level 
of ordinary life ; their speech must soar 
in imagination and it must have in ex- 
pression musical cadences. The modern 
opera has its reason in this need to be 
lyrical. It is artificial ; it can never, if it 
retain its absurd libretti or depend on the 
Wagnerian effects, appeal to the imagina- 
tion as cadenced lyrical dramas, such as 
"As You Like It" and "The Tem- 
pest" ; for the imagination is clogged, held 
down, by too much realism. The desire 
to uplift by means of sonorous lyrical 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 123 

words set to music is at the root of the 
creation of the opera. The Church — if 
I may be permitted to say so — has, es- 
pecially in the Tenebrae, shown how far 
dramatic suggestiveness may go without 
dragging the imagination too near reality. 
Shakespeare was an unconscious psycholo- 
gist, and he, applying his genius to lesser 
themes, understood admirably the essen- 
tial quality of suggestion. When rheto- 
ric seems, as with Laertes, to approach 
rant, it is the result of the poet's deter- 
mination to make the lounging gallants 
and the citizens and *prentice boys forget 
themselves in the high-pitched passion of 
the moment, — for this great artist could 
rely only on the influence of uttered 
words. His soliloquies — dramatic expe- 
diency forcing him to make his character 
speak to the public the very processes of 
his secret thought — are unquestioned by 
men of taste, because their seriousness and 
dignity are supported by fitting musical 
cadences. Under the master's art-spell, 
we forget that the sable-hued Hamlet 
ought to be absurd as he stands — the 
other characters having conveniently left 
him alone — not in self-communing silence. 



124 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

but in outspoken analysis of his own mind. 
Shakespeare meant to bear our imagina- 
tions into his world, and he succeeded ; he 
is more of a magician than Prospero. 

Perhaps of all the plays, " As You Like 
It " is most lyrical in structure. Newman 
says : 

" We may liken the Greek drama to the music 
of the Italian school ; in which the wonder is, 
how so much richness of invention in detail can 
be accommodated to a style so simple and uni- 
form. Each is the development of grace, fancy, 
pathos, and taste, in the respective media of 
representation and sound.'* 

Dr. Newman may have thought of 
the school of Mozart, but certainly not 
of the artificialities of Donizetti or Bellini. 
Similarly, "As You Like It'* resembles 
the structure which underlies the operas 
of the Italian composers. There are 
recitatives, the duets, arias, and those 
particularly English madrigal effects, which 
accentuate the pastoral feeling when the 
imagination needs the stimulus of more 
pronounced music. The Duke opens 
the first scene in the forest with the 
recitativo which closes : 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 125 

Sweet are the uses of adversity. 

Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous. 

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; » 

And this our life exempt from public haunt 

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks. 

Sermons in stones, and good in everything. 

I would not change it. 

There Is a snatch of dialogue between 
the exiled Duke and Amiens, and the 
First Lord begins his recitativo, — and 
an exquisitely lyrical one it is, — the de- 
scription of the oak and the deer, and the 
moralizing of the melancholy Jaques. It 
impedes the action ; Moliere would not 
have tolerated it ; modern theatrical man- 
agers cut it out ; it would be permitted 
only in a musical play. 

The lyrical phrases change and inter- 
weave. Sllvius breaks forth : 

O, thou did'st then ne'er love so heartily ! 

If thou remember'st not the slightest folly 

That ever love did make thee run into. 

Thou hast not loved; 

Or if thou hast not sat as I do now. 

Wearying thy hearer in thy mistress' praise. 

Thou hast not loved ; 

Or if thou hast not broke from company 

Abruptly, as my passion now makes me. 

Thou hast not loved. 



126 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

When Orlando appeals to the foresters 
for his fainting old servant, Adam, we hear 
the same cadences, artfully changed, — 

But whate'er you are 
That in this desert inaccessible. 
Under the shade of melancholy boughs. 
Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time; 
If ever you have look'd on better days. 
If ever been where bells have knoll' d to church. 
If ever sat at any good man's feast. 
If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear 
And know what 't is to pity and be pitied. 
Let gentleness my strong enforcement be; 
In the which hope I blush, and hide my sword. 

And when Jaques has ended his sad 
recitativoy 

All the world ' s a stage, 

Shakespeare waves his baton, and the 
meditative mood is relieved, but not in- 
terrupted by the lusty Amiens : 

Blow, blow, thou winter wind. 
Thou art not so unkind 

As man's ingratitude; 
Thy tooth is not so keen. 
Because thou art not seen. 

Although thy breath be rude. 

With a rush the chorus comes in — 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 127 

Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly: 
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly: 

Then, heigh-ho, the holly ! 

This life is most jolly. 

Amiens regains the thread of the 
melody : 

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky. 
That dost not bite so nigh 

As benefits forgot: 
Though thou the waters warp. 
Thy sting is not so sharp 

As friend remember' d not. 

Orlando opens Scene 2 of Act III 
with a new rhymed lyrical movement, 
and disappears to let the inferior Corin 
and Touchstone talk in everyday prose. 
In Scene 2 of Act V there is the quar- 
tette of Silvius, Phebe, Rosalind, and 
Orlando, with the suggestion of the fugue. 
It is not set to the music of the composer, 
and there is no direction in the text for 
musical accompaniment, but no reader 
could utter it without making verbal 
music the recurrent cadence : 

Phe. Good shepherd, tell this youth what 'tis to 

love. 
5/7. It is to be all made of sighs and tears ; 
And so am I for Phebe, 



128 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Phe. And I for Ganymede. 
Orl, And I for Rosalind. 
Ros. And I for no woman. 

Silvlus has his solo part: 

It is to be all made of fantasy. 

All made of passion, and all made of wishes, 

All adoration, duty, and observance. 

All humbleness, all patience and impatience. 

All purity, all trial, all observance. 

And so am I for Phebe. 

Phe. And so am I for Ganymede. 

Orl. And so am I for Rosalind. 

Ros. And so am I for no woman. 

Phebe, after this cadence, takes a new 
rhythmical modulation — 

Phe. If this be so, why blame you me to love 
you ? 

Sil. If this be so, why blame you me to love 
you ? 

Orl. If this be so, why blame you me to love 
you ? 

Ros. Who do you speak to, '* Why blame you 
me to love you ? ' * 

Orl. To her that is not here, nor doth not hear. 

The last act is made up of musical 
cadences, with a short interval of prose. 
The vocal fugue is imitated, especially in 
the speeches of Jaques and Rosalind, and 
the real song of that act is Hymen's : 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 129 

Then is there mirth in heaven 
When earthly things made even 
Atone together. 

" The Winter's Tale " is lyrical from 
beginning to end. The rogue, Autolycus, 
has some delightful snatches of song : 



and 



When daffodils begin to peer 

Lawn as white as driven snow; 
Cyprus black as e'er was crow; 
Gloves as sweet as damask roses; 
Masks for faces and for noses. 

And his part in the trio with Dorcas and 
Mopsa — 

Get you hence, for I must go, 
Where it fits not you to know. 

D. Whither ? M. Oh, whither : D. Whither ? 

For the delicate management of the 
pauses, for musical suggestiveness, for 
convincing appeal to the fancy, what can 
be better than the trio of the Shepherd, Po- 
lixenes, and Perdita, in Act IV, Scene 4 : 

O Proserpina, 
For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou let'st fall 
From Dis's waggon ! daffodils. 
That come before the swallow dares, and take 
9 



130 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

The winds of March with beauty; violets dim. 
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes 
Or Cytherea's breath. 

There is the aubade, in " Cymbeline," 
which bursts through the prose of Cloten's 
speech : 

Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings. 

And Phcebus 'gins arise. 
His steeds to water at those springs 

On chaliced flowers that lies ; 
And winking Mary-buds begin 

To ope their golden eyes : 
With everything that pretty is. 

My lady sweet, arise. 
Arise, arise ! 

Over Imogen's body Arviragus speaks : 

We '11 say our song the whilst. Brother, begin. 

Gut, Fear no more the heat o' the sun. 

Nor the furious winter's rages ; 

Thou thy worldly task hast done. 

Home «rt gone, and ta'en thy wages ; 
Golden lads and girls all must 
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 

Arv. Fear no more the frown o' the great ; 
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke; 
Care no more to clothe and eat ; 

To thee the reed is as the oak ; 
The sceptre, learning, physic, must 
All follow this, and come to dust. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 131 

Gut. Fear no more the lightning-flash, 
Arv, Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone. 
Gut, Fear not slander, censure rash ; 
Arv. Thou hast finished joy and moan. 
Both. All lovers young, all lovers must 
Consign to thee, and come to dust. 

Gui. No exerciser harm thee ! 
Arv. Nor no witchcraft charm thee ! 
Gui. Ghost unlaid forbear thee ! 
Arv. Nothing ill come near thee ! 
Both. Quiet consummation have. 

And renowned be thy grave ! 

Mr. Symonds says : 

" These songs cannot be regarded as occa- 
sional ditties, interpolated for the delectation of 
the audience. . . . They condense the particu- 
lar emotion of the tragedy or comedy in a quin- 
tessential drop of melody. Mr. Pater has dwelt 
upon a single instance of this fact with his usual 
felicity of phrase. Speaking of the song in 
'Measure for Measure,' he remarks that in it 
the kindling power and poetry of the whole play 
seem to pass for a moment into an actual strain 
of music." 

It is an actual strain of music, needing 
neither string nor wind instrument, but 
only the inspiration of unforced breath. It 
has all the qualities of music except pitch. 
(Portia was musical. When it comes to 



132 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Bassanio's turn to choose the casket, she 
is devoured with anxiety. She cannot 
tell him that the leaden box contains the 
key of his fate and hers. He, led by 
deluding fancy, may choose the gold or 
silver box. She must not speak, she can- 
not give him a hint in words of hers, but 
another may sing. } She confesses this to 
nobody, but makes a prelude to her care- 
fully chosen lyric : 

Let music sound while he doth make his choice ; 
Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end. 
Fading in music. 

And, while Bassanio comments on the 
caskets to himself, the song goes on : 

Tell me where is fancy bred. 
Or in the heart or in the head ? 
How begot, how nourished ? 

Reply, reply. 
It is engender'd in the eyes. 
With gazing fed ; and fancy dies 
In the cradle where it lies. 

Let us all ring fancy's knell; 

I'll begin it — Ding, dong, bell. 
All. Ding, dong, bell. 

Bassanio had more than tlie usual van- 
ity of his sex, and he was as thoughtlessly 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 133 

selfish as any other spirited gallant of his 
time, but he had a pretty wit and he 
catches the hint. 

So may the outward shows be least themselves ; 
The world is still deceived with ornament. 

On the message of this lyric depends 
the turn of the play, and yet how easily 
and naturally it is dropped in ! It falls 
so gently that it seems to be a gliding 
strain caught as a point of rest in the sus- 
pensive interest of the moment, but it 
determines Bassanio's action. 

There are musicians who thank heaven 
for " A Midsummer Night's Dream " be- 
cause it suggested Mendelssohn's music. 
Herr Ambros, in " The Boundaries of 
Music and Poetry," seems to draw very 
near to this. He says : 

" When we are listening to the wonderfully 
elusive, fluttering, skipping, bantering G-minor 
scherzo (this miracle of instrumentation) intro- 
ducing Puck's roguish pranks, we believe every- 
thing which the poet relates of him — before our 
eyes. Puck skips into the side scenes ; to our ears, 
he actually flies like the arrow from the Indian's 
bow ; and we believe the ear more than the 
eye." 



134 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

This is true — but only after we have 
known the play and steeped ourselves in 
the scent of the musk-roses and seen the 
moonlight on the banks of wild thyme. 
It is to the ear that Shakespeare speaks, 
— even a cursory study of his lyrism will 
make that plain ; he speaks through 
music, but it is a music more evanescent, 
less palpable, but more directly expressive 
than Mendelssohn's, because it is a music 
essential to the words themselves, not a 
set of musical sounds speaking a com- 
poser's impressions of them. Where 
Shakespeare has given 

To airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name, 

Mendelssohn interprets it in music ; the 
G-minor scherzo might mean almost any- 
thing gay, if the composer of " Songs with- 
out Words" had not told us of the theme 
on which he founded it. No ; the music 
of Mendelssohn may suggest, but never so 
directly and unequivocally as the metred 
phrases of the lyrist. Shakespeare knew 
this, and, better than this, he knew that 
his appeal must be by concordant words 
to the emotions, through the imagination. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 135 

He must make pictures too. And in 
the old days at Stratford, in the homely- 
country lanes and fields, he had gathered 
all the material for these pictures. The 
folk-song heard at twilight, the glimpse 
of the spot in the chalice of the cowslip 
like a drop of blood, the dying fall of the 
madrigal as the shepherds went their way 
to the shearing, the daisies " smell-less, 
yet most quaint," — all these had become 
part of his younger life, and about them 
sounded the echoes of the glees and rustic 
dances. Thus the picture and the ac- 
cented words were one. 

No realism can altogether ruin the 
lyrism of " A Midsummer Night^s 
Dream " ; for the poet, forced to soar 
above the sordid surroundings of his 
theatre, made an appeal with all the 
strength of his genius, strengthened by 
many garnered treasures drawn from 
Nature herself, which Mendelssohn or 
Berlioz could only suggest, but never 
reach. The pleasanter dramas of Shake- 
speare, without the lyrism, would still be 
the masterpieces of character and philoso- 
phy taken from life, but they would not 
deserve the name of comedies in Moliere's 



136 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

sense, nor could they be justly held to 
compare with his. They would lack that 
exquisite, permeative charm that makes 
them the most beautiful things of their 
kind under heaven. And the strength of 
this charm is in part due to the fact that 
even the smallest lyric arises from the 
feeling of the composition and intensifies 
it. The melodious " Spring Song " at 
the end of "Love's Labor's Lost" is at 
once a conclusion and a harbinger. Men- 
delssohn, the composer, recalls the Spring, 
but only when we know beforehand that 
he intends to recall it ; the " Winter Song " 
has the meaning of an epilogue. And the 
very bloom of the mood of the Duke, in 
" Twelfth Night," is accented by 

That old and antique song we heard last night : 
Methought it did relieve my passion much. 
More than light airs and recollected terms 
Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times : 
Come, but one verse. . . . 

** Come away, come away, death. 

And in sad cypress let me be laid." 

And the Prince Ferdinand's amazement 
is turned to sad remembrance by Ariers 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 137 

song, which is as much a part of the feel- 
ing of the moment as the glow is in a 
ruby. 

Full fathom five thy father lies ; 

Of his bones are coral made ; 
Those are pearls that were his eyes ; 
Nothing of him that doth fade 

But doth suffer a sea-change 
Into something rich and strange. 
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell : 

Ding-dong. 
Hark ! now I hear them, — Ding-dong, bell. 

What can be said of these lyrics, except 
that, whether invented by Shakespeare or 
borrowed from antique songs, they were 
made by him essential to the works in 
which they appear ? While their echoes 
are with me I shall write no more ; for, as 
Armado says, 

The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs 
Of Apollo. You that way; we this way. 



THE PUZZLE OF HAMLET 



THE PUZZLE OF HAMLET 

"f I "^HE puzzle of Hamlet" is a 
I phrase frequently repeated ; and 
JL. the more "Hamlet" is con- 
sidered by the critics, the oftener it is re- 
peated. The reasons for it may be found in 
the lack of serious study given to the text 
of this incomparable drama and psycho- 
logical study, as well as in the neglect by 
readers of culture of the contemporary 
literature of Shakespeare's time. Added 
to these is the strange habit of guessing 
at Shakespeare's meaning from a modern 
point of view. This habit is fixed by the 
determination of so many persons to read 
the past as if we possessed the one ray 
capable of illuminating it. It is as if we 
thought the secrets of old rolls of papy- 
rus could reveal themselves only under 
the rays of the electric light. " Hamlet " 
has been made a puzzle because of our 
inability to look at the text from the 
point of view of a contemporary. " 'Ow 



142 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

could Shakespeare 'ave lived in such a 
nasty 'ouse without gas ? " asked a Cock- 
ney at Stratford. It is easy to supply 
the gas. 

In one of the most scholarly works in the 
department of English literature written 
in the last fifteen years, " A History of 
Criticism," George Saintsbury says, speak- 
ing of the critical necessity of confining 
ourselves to the actual texts : 

"This is not perhaps a fashionable proceed- 
ing. Not what Plato says, but what the latest 
commentator says about Plato ; not what 
Chaucer says, but what the latest thesis-writer 
thinks about Chaucer, — is supposed to be the 
qualifying study of the scholar. I am not able 
to share this conception of scholarship. When 
we have read and digested the whole of Plato, 
we may, if we like, turn to his latest German 
editor; when we have read and digested the 
whole of Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare's 
contemporaries, we may, if we like, turn to 
Shakespearean biographers and commentators." 

A fault in much Shakespearean criti- 
cism is that it is too reverential. The 
writer who scans the Bible, alert to find 
an anachronism or an exaggeration, 
sprawls at full length before the silliest 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 143 

" sallet " of the Bard of Avon, or perhaps 
of Messrs. Hemynge and Condell, in 
rapt admiration. Hysterical girls after a 
morning recital by Paderewski are no 
more ecstatic than some of the Shake- 
spearean acolytes. This blazon ought 
not to be ; it makes Shakespeare an idol 
hidden in clouds of incense, an idol to be 
worshipped as unreasoningly as all idols 
are worshipped. From what we can 
discover of the English of the sixteenth 
century — and no great list of historical 
references is needed to show this — we 
know that they regarded a play as a play, 
not as an enigma to be thought about, 
written about, discussed as a problem in" 
philosophy. All the reconstructions of 
the Elizabethan playhouse show that the 
auditors went there to weep or laugh, 
to love the hero and to detest the villain, 
to applaud the good and to hate the bad. 
The recent revival of the Catholic moral- 
ity play, " Everyman,'* ought to give us 
a clue to the truth that the drama in 
England, from the day of its appear- 
ance in the monasteries to the day of its 
disappearance under the ban of ultra- 
Protestantism, was written to be seen and 



144 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

heard, not to be read or academically 
analyzed. Again, although we talk of 
the continuity of history, we do not take 
seriously the truth it implies, — that in 
essentials human nature has always been 
the same, and that by recognizing these 
essentials we get the keys to many things 
of the past that are closed to us by the 
unconscious assumption that we are a 
new order of beings, transformed by the 
Reformation and experimental philosophy ! 
That the Elizabethans and the Jaco- 
beans did not, in the space of a few years, 
break completely with the beliefs and 
traditions of the Roman Catholic Church ; 
that they, in spite of the manner in which 
distance and romance have transfigured 
them, took a matter-of-fact view of life ; 
and that there were varying shades of be- 
lief, opinion, and taste are facts that might 
well be taken into consideration in dis- 
cussing the meaning of " Hamlet." No 
audience will flock to a playhouse to see a 
tragedy which it does not understand or 
with which it is out of sympathy. The 
moralities and miracle plays were almost 
too obvious for our present taste, but not 
more than sufficiently obvious for the 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 145 

liking of the English of the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries. The dramas of 
Shakespeare, Fletcher, Chapman, and the 
rest may contain a cipher : that is another 
question. It is certain that the noble 
earl who liked to listen to music or to 
mingle with his countrymen of a lower 
caste at bear-baitings did not go to see 
" Hamlet " for the zest of solving any 
problem, whether in cipher or not. 

A lover of Shakespeare, recognizing 
these things, has two quarrels on his 
hands, or, at least, two reasons for irrita- 
tion in his mind. One is with the expos- 
itor of " Hamlet" who treats the text as 
a mere matter for the student ; the other 
with the actor who, having in his art so 
many means that make for clarity, uses 
the play as if his own personality were 
the first thought, and the meaning of the 
author the second. To these reasons for 
discontent may be added the student's 
disregard of the actor's part in the mak- 
ing of the play, and the actor's slavish 
obedience, in minor details, to the stu- 
dent. The student forgets that " Hamlet" 
was written to be acted, and the actor does 
not recognize that neither philological 



146 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

guesses of the note-maker nor the 
exact shape of Laertes' cloak is of con- 
sequence, provided the value of each 
character be so expressed that the meaning 
of the tragedy is full and clear. When 
the actor can impress on the student 
that, if " intuitional " interpretation is to 
be allowed, he has the advantage, because 
he is forced in the exercise of his art to 
take Shakespeare's point of view, we 
may have less critical dust thrown in 
our eyes. 

There is now no difference of opinion 
as to the position of" Hamlet" in the lit- 
erature of the world, Voltaire having been 
long ago thrown out of court. Insight 
into man's heart and mind, and into the 
fundamental varieties which underlie life, 
expressed in words of piercing beauty and 
aptness, is acknowledged to exist in this 
play to an amazing degree ; but if the 
art form in which these appear is defec- 
tive, the symmetry of the masterpiece is 
affected. In a word, if the play does not 
answer all the requirements of a play, if 
it is not interesting and clear, Shakespeare 
made a serious mistake in adopting the 
dramatic form. If Shakespeare was not 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 147 

j ^^rp whether Hamlet was mad or not, or 
whether he was noble or not, or whether 
he loved Ophelia or not, or whether 
Gertrude had sinned or not, he had the 
commentators of the future in his mind's 
eye, and he wrote for them ; but as 
his utter disregard of the future of his 
written plays shows that he did not con- 
sider the commentators, he must have 
hajd in mind an immediate audience. 
And for the audience of the moment the 
dramatist must be sure of what he wants 
to say, and must say it with vigor. 
There have been exceptions, no doubt, 
but not enough to prove that a so-called 
drama, of the vagueness of one of Henry 
James's novels, could hold the attention 
of normal auditors. From the first, 
" Hamlet," as a play, is clear and admi- 
rably constructed to meet the demands 
of the London stage of the time. 

A glance at the source of the play — 
the " Historie of Hamblet" — connotes 
the evident purpose of Shakespeare to 
show that the Prince of Denmark coun- 
terfeits madness. Hamblet, in the " His- 
toric," is, however, a very young prince, 
who imitates Brutus, because he knows 



148 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

that his father-uncle, Fengon, suspects 
that he will avenge his father's murder as 
soon as he comes of age. He is a pagan, 
and he thinks and acts as a pagan ; but 
Shakespeare was too much of his own 
time to be able to project himself into 
a pagan mind, and too much of an artist 
to forgo the opportunities offered by a 
conflict between Christianity and that na- 
ture which Edmund in his famous so- 
liloquy called his "goddess." In this 
conflict lies the pregnant interest of the 
play. 

If Hamlet had Edmund's contempt 
for any law but nature's, the play would 
have lost its deep dramatic interest. 
In the " Historic of Hamblet," as in 
Malory's " Morte Arthure," paganism 
shows plainly through the Christian 
veneering. The translators apologize 
for this, conscious always of the lack of 
sympathy in their readers for a prince, 
no matter how greatly injured, who 
would thirst for the mere satisfaction 
of vengeance. In "Hamlet" the pagan 
man bursts through the habits of the 
Christian mind. The young Prince will 
not kill Claudius at his prayers : 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 149 

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying ; 

And now I '11 do 't. And so he goes to heaven ; 

And so am I revenged. That would be scann'd: 

A villain kills my father ; and for that, 

I, his sole son, do this same villain send 

To heaven. 

O, this is hire and salary, not revenge. 

The pagan writing on the palimpsest 
has not been entirely effaced. Whether 
Shakespeare had read the " Historie of 
Hamblet" or not, or whether he founded 
" Hamlet " on an old tragedy derived 
from the " Historie," it is evident that he 
had at least at heart the conflict between 
Christian law and that lawlessness, that 
giving way to natural impulses, — to 
desire or hatred, knowing no law, — 
which we call pagan. How coolly, too, 
Hamlet sends his treacherous friends, 
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to their 
death ! His excuse would have seemed 
a valid one to EHzabethans, for the trai- 
torous friends had been privy to a plot 
for compassing the ruin of one of the 
royal blood, and the rightful heir to the 
throne. Horatio is astonished that these 
two fellow-students should be let go 
straight to their fate. Hamlet says : 



150 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Why, man, they did make love to this employment ; 
They are not near my conscience ; their defeat 
Does by their own insinuation grow. 

Hamlet does not doom these traitors 
to death in madness ; it is not madness 
that makes him spare the King's life 
until he can think that the murder will 
plunge him into hell. He is frenzied 
for the moment, when he kills Polonius, 
behind the arras, believing that Claudius 
is listening there ; he is nervously over- 
wrought, and in the overwhelming horror 
of the Ghost's revelation, striving for 
self-control, until, in the tumult of heart 
and brain, he seems unbalanced and 
hysterical, but never, even for a moment, 
mad. The madness that he alludes to, 
in his pathetic words to Laertes, is evi- 
denced in those episodes. It is the loss 
of that habitual balance which he admires 
so much in Horatio, who is never 
" passion's slave." Passion's slave at 
times Hamlet is. In this consists his 
madness. 

Hamlet is essentially noble ; he may 

decline from the law, but he knows, 

loves, and respects it. Claudius, on the 

^<K)ther hand, being a man of parts, knows 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 151 

and hates it ; he sins, and trembles before 
God, but before man he is every inch a 
king, in spite of Hamlet's passionate 
exaggeration of his defects. He accepts 
evil with open eyes. He would be vir- 
tuous if virtue could be reconciled with 
friendship for the world, the flesh, and 
the devil. He would be good if he 
were not compelled to make satisfaction 
for evil done to his neighbor. Luther's 
comfortable doctrine about works had 
not been preached in Shakespeare's Den- 
mark. Claudius is no mere " king of 
shreds and patches," though some of the 
commentators and most of the actors 
make him so, — as they make an arrant 
fool or a comic knave of Polonius, who 
was an accomplished Euphuist and a 
clever courtier. 

It is impossible to enjoy the play, as 
a clear and logical work, without keep- 
ing in mind that it was written for the 
theatre, acted under the direction of 
Shakespeare, and made actual by what 
the stage-manager in our time would call 
" business." And this " business," — 
the technical direction for the dumb 
show, or the actions suited to the word. 



152 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

— which elucidates the meaning of 
speech, must have been as delicately and 
carefully considered as is every line in the 
text. The record of this " business " we 
have lost, and the loss is irreparable. 
If it existed, the student who looks on 
" Hamlet " as a text detached from dra- 
matic action would not have had matters 
so much his own way, and the actor who 
derives most of his traditions from the 
practice of other actors of no greater 
knowledge than himself would not cause 
intelligent lovers of Shakespeare to wish 
that " Hamlet " might never be degraded 
by the glare of the footlights. Never- 
theless, the impulse of the actor to cause 
the play to be as obvious as possible has 
wrought good results. The actor knows, 
what our critics do not seem always to 
know, that no accomplished playwright 
wants to obscure the processes or the ob- 
jects of his drama, or to convert an act- 
ing play into an elusive study as Orphic 
as one of Richard Strauss's symphonic 
poems. He may, and he generally does, 
neglect every other character in the play, 
to round out that of the Prince ; but at 
his worst he must regard the action as 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 153 

well as the words. His consciousness 
of an audience that does not care to think 
forces him to present effectively what the 
student in his closet refines, re-refines, 
and over-refines. Hamlet, with him, 
is a man, not a mind divorced from a 
man, and he has not such a superstitious 
regard for the text that he will allow 
words to stand, merely as words which 
have no meaning, if not illumined by 
gesture or facial expression. The actor 
makes mistakes at times : in his passion 
for effects, he overleaps truth, as when, 
after the death of Polonius, he weeps 
and groans in most unprincely fashion. 
Hamlet says: 

For this same lord 
I do repent : but heaven hath pleased it so. 
To punish me with this and this with me. 
That I must be their scourge and minister. 

At the end of this most dramatic 
scene Hamlet "drags in the body of 
Polonius,"^ the Queen hurrying away 
by another door. The actor who should 
coolly and cruelly obey the stage direction 
would bring upon himself the hisses of 

1 ** Exeunt severally ; Hamlet dragging in the body of 
Polonius.'' 



154 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

the auditors and destroy all sympathy for 
Hamlet, unless it is presumed that he 
had suddenly become insane. The text 
of the interview between Hamlet and his 
mother ought to render that supposition 
out of the question, although Gertrude, 
horrified by the effect of the Ghost's 
appearance on her son, says : 

This is the very coinage of your brain : 
This bodiless creation ecstasy 
Is very cunning in. 

She does not see her husband, Ham- 
let's father, "in his habit as he lived," 
come to hold the Prince, by the bonds 
of love, to his " almost blunted purpose." 
" Taint not thy mind," the spirit of the 
King — suffering, unpurged of crimes, not 
great in the eyes of men, but foul before 
the purity of God — has said. And now, 
not as a king, not as an outraged patriot 
seeing with clear eyes that sin is corrupt- 
ing Denmark, and that the roots of the 
cancer must be torn out by Hamlet, but 
as a suppliant for the soul of the Queen, 
he comes. That the " illusion " was no 
illusion in the modern sense is shown 
by the stage direction in the First Folio, 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 155 

"Enter the Ghost." That the Ghost 
was no hallucination in the beginning 
of the play, Shakespeare takes pains to 
prove by the testimony of the soldiers, 
and, more convincing than all, by the 
evidence of the clear-minded Horatio. 
As Hamlet was not mad, the dragging 
in of Polonius could not have been the 
only business set down for Hamlet after 
the exit of his mother ; and " severally " 
is not sufficiently definite. 

The actor whose instinct is true sees 
this, and supplies the business to save the 
situation. At times he is intemperate, — 
there have been actors who grovelled at the 
feet of Polonius and howled with grief in 
the most unprincely manner and unphilo- 
sophical fashion. The student does not, 
as a rule, weep at all or conceive that 
Hamlet could have wept. He takes the 
text as it stands, and Hamlet, instead of 
for the moment assuming a coldness that 
he does not feel to impress the Queen 
with the surety of his purpose, becomes 
brutal in madness. Much of the text 
of Shakespeare, which seems inconsistent 
and is therefore held to have deep and 
even occult meaning by isolated students, 



156 THE GHOST- IN HAMLET 

simply needs the theatrical business — 
not set down in the stage Folio or the 
Quarto — to be clear and consistent. In 
minor passages this is very plain. For 
instance, in the First Act, when the Ghost 
passes, and Horatio cries out, — 

I '11 cross it, though it blast me, 

the business explanatory of this is differ- 
ently interpreted by actors, and though 
great play is made with the cross-handles 
of the swords in the swearing scene, the 
usual method is for Horatio merely to 
cross the path of the Ghost. The 
famous romantic player, Fechter, made 
the sign of the cross, and, as the Ghost 
did not flinch, — as it would have done 
had it been an evil spirit, — he went on 
with his truly Christian appeal to a spirit 
in a process of purgation : 

If there be any good thing to be done. 
That may to thee do ease and grace to mc. 
Speak to me : 

If thou art privy to thy country's fate. 
Which, happily, foreknowing may avoid, 
O, speak ! 

What the actor of the Ghost did in 
Shakespeare's time, we have no means 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 157 

of knowing. The business accompany- 
ing Hamlet's 

Look here, upon this picture, and on this, 

is not even so important, yet it is some- 
times a piece of very gross exaggeration. 
It will never be possible for an actor to 
insert the business in the grave-diggers' 
scene, as described by M. de la Baume 
Desdossat, when he said that the author 
" fait jouer a la boule avec des tetes de mort 
sur le theatre." The bowling with death's 
heads on the stage might easily be intro- 
duced to exemplify Hamlet's allusion to 
the old game of "loggats" by the perform- 
ers who wanted to accentuate the Gothic 
and grim humor of the clowns. Knight 
smiles at the statement of the exquisite 
M. Desdossat, and yet some of the busi- 
ness introduced by the theatrical grave- 
diggers is not less grotesque ; and who 
can conclude that it is really out of 
keeping in the awful contrast Shake- 
speare makes ? There is, as I have said, 
the evidence of no prompters' books to 
the contrary. The taste of the time is the 
only limit one can set to the grotesque 
in Shakespeare or in any author of his 



158 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

period. It is evident from the text that 
the spirit of Shakespeare is against exag- 
geration of any kind, and the taste of our 
time is with his. The actor of to-day 
runs a great risk when, as Laertes, he 
stands over the body of Ophelia, satu- 
rated with the water of the pool and 
bound by clinging plants, and says : 

Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, 

And therefore I forbid my tears : but yet 

It is our trick ; nature her custom holds. 

Let shame say what it will : when these are gone. 

The woman will be out. 

Often these lines are omitted, and with 
reason. The actor is on delicate ground 
in uttering what, in our time, seems a 
bombastic exaggeration. We cannot tell 
whether Shakespeare softened his rhetoric 
by business. At any rate, we can be sure 
that the lines were delivered under Shake- 
speare's direction, so that they could in 
no way interfere with the pathos of the 
moment. The modesty of nature seems 
to be outraged by them, as they stand in 
cold print; but who can say that, from 
the actor's point of view, — which was 
also Shakespeare's, — they were not so \ 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 159 

presented that even to-day they would 
not have offended our taste? In most^ 
of our modern plays every direction is 
carefully written ; no doubt is left by the 
author in the mind of the reader as to 
the exact position of any character at 
any given time on the stage. But these 
minute directions do not appear in the 
reading edition of the play, — though, 
as a rule, the literary quality of modern 
plays is so poor that nobody cares to read 
them. They are arranged for the stage, 
and when they disappear from the stage, 
their value likewise disappears. They 
exist, like the score of an opera by 
Verdi, or a symphony of Beethoven, 
only when they are interpreted. 

Shakespeare's meaning suffers when his 
plays are read as if they were intended 
merely to be read. A poet of the first 
class, and, consequently, a transfigurer of 
life, an interpreter of the fundamentals and 
universals of human character, he chose 
the form of expression most adapted to 
the feeling and taste of his time. It has 
been noticed many times that the limita- 
tions of the Elizabethan playhouse forced 
him to adopt a method more akin to that 



i6o THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

of the modern novelist than that of the 
modern playwright. His characters tell 
us, in their speeches, many things of local 
and temporal import which, in the modern 
play, are indicated, through the change 
in the theatrical apparatus, to the sight. 
The Queen's description of the death of 
Ophelia, and the poetic expression of 
Jacques's reveries would be mere " words, 
words, words," to the theatrical writer of 
the present day, who uses words in order 
to make pictures as seldom as possible. 
When Gower enters, at the beginning of 
the fifth act of " Pericles," he asks the 
auditors to do what the novelist often 
asks his readers to do, — to " make be- 
lieve," to " suppose." 

In your supposing once more put your sight 
Of heavy Pericles ; think this his bark : 
Where what is done in action, more, if might. 
Shall be discovered ; please you, sit and hark. 

The audience of to-day neither " sup- 
poses " nor " sits and harks." It sits 
and sees. Shakespeare could not adapt 
his plays to the modern theatre without 
destroying their literary value. At the 
same time they would have lost their 



AND OTHER ESSAYS i6i 

power of appeal to the folk of his time, 
were they literature only, and not dumb 
show, at times, and very vigorous action 
as well. 

The characters of Regan and Goneril 
in " King Lear " seem to be monsters of 
evil without any attractive traits. They 
are so wicked that many lovers of Shake- 
speare have classed them as theatrical 
puppets created as foils to Cordelia. And 
it must be confessed that the bare text 
gives this impression, for there are few 
phrases concerning them that suggest to 
the imagination that they are more than 
twin creatures wedded, unhumanly, to 
sin. Edmund, too, seems unhuman, — 
a mind of lust and lawlessness, a pawn of 
the author's to bring out one of the em- 
phatic lessons of the play, that sin blinds 
us to the truth, — that both Lear and 
Gloucester suffered because, wedded to 
their pet sins, their minds had grown so 
darkened that they could not distinguish 
truth from falsehood. But neither Regan 
nor Goneril is a mere puppet. Regan 
and Goneril differ in attributes. Albany 
calls Goneril "a gilded serpent"; and 
on this hint the actor should build. 



i62 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Goneril and Regan are too often treated 
as evil twins, in no way different except 
in their love for Edmund. As for 
Edmund, he is most dependent on the 
actor ; the text is full of subtle hints, not 
always considered by either the reader or 
the personator. Edgar says : 

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices 
Make instruments to plague us : 
The dark and vicious place where thee he got 
Cost him his eyes. 

And Edmund replies : 

Thou hast spoken right, 't is true ; 
The vv'heel is come full circle ; I am here. 

Dying, Edmund goes back, in triumph, 
to his sin again : 

Yet Edmund was beloved : 
The one the other poison' d for my sake. 
And after slew herself. 

Edmund is a character created for the 
actor, and it requires all the art of artful 
actors to interpret his subtlety. The 
puzzle-questions as to Edmund — Is he 
an atheist ? Is he not a mere creature 
of circumstances ^ — become quite plain 
when Edmund appears in flesh and blood, 
with a will to choose Nature as his goddess. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 163 

and a belief, at least, in nature's law. lago 
himself, a self-degraded and super-subtle 
soul, is, too, human only in the actor's 
hands. His plottings, read in cold blood, 
on the printed page, make him seem to be 
simply a devil, sojourning for a time on 
earth in human form. 

On the other hand, the theatre has 
a way of being careful in minor details, 
which are often stifling to the imagi- 
nation, and careless in more important 
things not considered in a certain class 
of modern novels. A manager who 
prides himself on the minutiae of a gon- 
dola in "The Merchant of Venice" or 
on the fidelity to detail in the view of 
a Venetian street in " Othello " will cut 
out those most important lines in the 
speech of the Ghost in "Hamlet," — 

Unhousel'd, disappointed, unaneled. 

They seem unimportant to the reader 
of Shakespeare who cannot conceive — 
being without present knowledge of his- 
torical data — their terrible meaning : 

Unhousel'd, disappointed, unaneled. 
No reckoning made, but sent to my account 
With all my imperfections on my head : 
O, horrible ! O, horrible ! most horrible ! 



i64 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

The spirit's heart-wrung exclamation is 
that he died without the last sacraments, 
disappointed of his rights as a Christian, 
unshriven, without extreme unction. The 
statement affects Hamlet terribly ; we 
learn it later in the play. Hamlet broods 
on it, and he does not keep in mind that 
the Ghost is not a lost soul, though 
suffering the pains of purgation ; that he 
thinks only of those pains we know 
well from his soliloquy over the praying 
Claudius. Less archaeology and more 
art, less attention to the conditions of 
minds in the play, would do away with 
the aspersion that the theatre, in the 
United States at least, has no historical 
sense. 

The accent laid by the spirit of the 
elder Hamlet on his loss of the rites 
of the Church had its value, we may 
be sure, to the auditors in the Globe 
Theatre. It has its value to-day, not 
only to persons who have the historical 
sense, but to many who can see — 
whether we admit that Shakespeare's 
conception of the Ghost was strictly 
theological or not — that he realized what 
was meant by the cutting off of a 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 165 

Christian soul from its rights. Again, the 
Polonius of the modern theatre is a cross 
between a knave and a fool. It is true 
that Hamlet calls him a fool, but Hamlet 
in his fits of passion is not to be trusted. 
His picture of his uncle, for instance, — 
" Hyperion to a satyr," — and his under- 
rating the qualities of a courageous, cool, 
highly intellectual, but deliberately bad 
man, as Claudius was, ought to show the 
representators that Hamlet's estimate of 
Polonius should be taken only as the 
estimate of an overwrought, almost mad- 
dened, and supersensitive soul. Polonius 
was shrewd, capable of deep thought, 
cultured, after the older fashion of the 
Euphuists ; and a closer study of the 
influences that made him possible would 
prevent the actors or the managers from 
misrepresenting his creator's idea. 

In the Prologue of the first act of 
Henry V, when Shakespeare despairs of 
crowding the splendid pageant of Agin- 
court into the theatre, he exclaims against 
the limits of the stage : 

Can this cockpit hold 
The vasty fields of France ? or may we cram 
Within this wooden O the very casques 



i66 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

That did affright the air at Agincourt ? 
O, pardon ! since a crooked figure may- 
Attest in little place a million ; 
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt. 
On your imaginary forces work. 
Suppose within the girdle of these walls 
Are now confined two mighty monarchies. 
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts 
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder : 
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts ; 
Into a thousand parts divide one man. 
And make imaginary puissance : 
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them 
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth. 

As a rule, Shakespeare adapts his 
dramas to the bounds of his theatrical 
world without any evident dissatisfaction 
with them. In fact, if his means of 
satisfying the sight had been greater, our 
pleasure in reading his plays would have 
been less. 

No better example can be found in 
" Hamlet " of the loss the student suffers 
from the absence of the business used 
by the actors in the days of Elizabeth 
and James than in the first scene of the 
third act. Hamlet has unveiled his 
doubtful mind, and suddenly he sees 
Ophelia. A flood of sudden tenderness 
sweeps over his heart; 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 167 

Soft you now ! 
The fair Ophelia ! Nymph, in thy orisons 
Be all my sins remember' d. 

It almost seems as if the wide-spread 
delusion that Hamlet is really mad were 
founded mainly on this scene ; for here, 
unless some adequate reason for his sus- 
picion of Ophelia's truth could be given 
to the auditors, he seems to be not only 
mad, but possessed of a brutal and sullen 
devil. It is enough for the close student 
of the play to believe, after careful com- 
parison of various parts of the text, that 
Hamlet had come to distrust all women, 
and that he was vowed to " wjLpe away 
all trivial fond records '' ; but it is not 
enough for the average auditor, and we 
may be sure that there was some busi- 
ness arranged to explain obviously the 
Prince's outburst of wrath, after a mo- 
ment, too, of extreme tenderness. The 
stage direction is simply " Exeunt King 
and Polonius." But where do they go 
for their " lawful espials " ? Behind the 
arras ? Into a gallery at the back of a 
room in the castle? The author sees 
that their presence must be made known 
to Hamlet, in order that he may have 



i68 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

an excuse for acting the part of madness 
with such brutality. He must have some 
plain proof that Ophelia is playing upon 
him for the benefit of her father, and the 
anditors, according to the usage of the 
stage, must know that he has this proof; 
therefore it is the custom, in many stage 
presentments of the play, to reveal acci- 
dentally, for a moment, the presence of 
the King and Polonius. The insults of 
Hamlet — excusable only in a madman 
or one feigning madness — are directed 
then, not at the fair and gentle Ophelia, 
but at the listeners. 

"I did love you once," he says with 
a breaking voice, and he adds, remember- 
ing, " I loved you not." 

" I was the more deceived," Ophelia 
answers gently. 

Then Hamlet, fearing his own weak- 
ness, frightens Ophelia with his accusations 
against himself. Her gentle face appeals 
to him, and he puts her to the test : 

" Where *s your father? " 

" At home, my lord." 

With the sensitive instinct of love, his 
face has read in Ophelia's that she is 
deceiving him. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 169 

There is no relenting after that. He 
loves her still, but he knows that she has 
deceived him. To the winds he flings 
his wrath ; the listeners must beheve him 
mad, and she — " Frailty, thy name is 
woman.'* 

Considered as a play, treated as intel- 
ligent actors who desired simply to bring 
out its meaning would treat it, " Hamlet*' 
ceases to be a puzzle. It must be 
remembered, however, that, until the 
historical sense is cultivated in the thea- 
tres, light thrown on certain passages by 
the actor's instinct and insight will not 
pierce other passages equally worthy of 
illumination. 



THE GREATEST OF SHAKE- 
SPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES 



THE GREATEST OF SHAKE- 
SPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES 

IT is not strange that American and 
English writers of plays should seize 
their material as they do, but it is 
amazing that our modern dramatists 
should appropriate with so little discre- 
tion. While every tyro in the dramatic 
art rushes to Feuillet and Dumas for sit- 
uations and motives, and forgotten com- 
edies written when Mademoiselle Fargueil 
was in her prime are dismembered by 
the scissors of the modern dramatist, 
Lope de Vega and Calderon, who left 
innumerable treasures, and later Spanish 
dramatists of great merit are neglected. 
As the rage for play-writing is now at 
its height, the seeker after dramatic situa- 
tions would do well to drop his search 
for French novelties and turn his atten- 
tion toward that magnificent national out- 
growth of the most magnificent nation 
of Europe, the Spanish drama. Beside 



174 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

it French dramatic art is stilted and 
colorless; "Faust" loses much, because 
it eternally questions and never answers ; 
Greek dramatic art, individual and strong, 
does not dwarf it; for Calderon, the 
greatest dramatic poet of Spain, lacked 
only the humor of Shakespeare to have 
been the greatest dramatic poet of the 
world. 

The political revolt of Henry VIII did 
for a time much intellectual harm to all of 
us who have inherited the English tongue, 
by narrowing our literary sympathies. 
Sectarian narrowness caused Calderon to 
be only a name, more or less connected 
with the Inquisition, and consequently 
disreputable, and made us content with 
a small portion of the glorious inheri- 
tance which Catholic Spain has left us. 
It would be absurd to claim that Cal- 
deron was a poet because he was a Cath- 
olic, but it is certain that Dante and he 
would never have been great poets had 
they not been Catholics. They were 
glorious flowers blooming at the end of 
a glorious Summer. Around them were 
the tinted leaves of decay which hid in 
false splendor the track of death ; their 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 175 

roots were not nourished by the sun-dried 
soil around them ; they struck, deeper and 
were vivified by eternal springs. The 
influences about them would have made 
Dante a weaver of conceits, and Calderon 
an inventor of court spectacles. Medi- 
aeval Christianity strengthened their in- 
spiration. As Emerson has it : 

The litanies of nations came. 
Like the volcano's tongue of flame. 
Up from the burning cave below — 
The canticles of love and woe ; 
The hand that rounded Peter's dome. 
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, 
Wrought in a sad sincerity : 
Himself from God he could not free. 

God, the Trinity, our Lord, true God 
and true man. His blessed Mother, and 
the saints, are always with Calderon. 
The teaching of the Church was the 
pivot upon which all his world swung ; 
her life filled his heart and soul. Hu- 
manity might ask questions and nature 
present problems, but Calderon always 
found their answer and solution in relig- 
ion. It is this characteristic of the great 
Spanish poet which causes Frederick 
Schlegel to exclaim : " In this great and 



176 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

divine master the enigma of life is not 
only expressed but solved." But the 
Schlegels were smitten with that Calderon 
fever against which Goethe protested, and 
their indiscriminate praise has done his 
reputation as much harm as the coldness, 
prejudice, and ignorance of Sismondi and 
Hallam. Hallam, however, was only 
ignorant of Calderon's real merit, while 
Sismondi was evidently prejudiced. It 
may seem ridiculous, but it seems never- 
theless true, that if the fact that Dante 
put popes into the inferno had not given 
the Italian master a piquant flavor, he 
would not have become so well known 
among us. Even Dean Trench, who has 
written a valuable and sympathetic essay 
on Calderon, approaches his " autos," or 
religious dramas, hesitatingly, and, broad- 
minded as the Dean is, he constantly 
offers apologies to his prejudices by care- 
fully explaining that he does not admire 
Calderon's " Romanism.*' After having 
made this plain he says : " And it is not 
too much to say of the greater number of 
these marvellous compositions that they 
are hymns of loftiest praise to redeeming 
love, summonses to all things which have 



AND OTFTER ESSAYS 177 

breath to praise the Lord ; and he, too, 
that writes, writes as one that has seen 
Satan fall like lightning from heaven, and 
rejoices in spirit with his Lord." 

Calderon's " autos " were the perfection 
of the miracle-play, or " mystery,'* which 
was the national drama of Spain. With 
the skill of a trained dramatist (he was 
manager of the court theatre in the palace 
of the Buen Retiro) and the insight of a 
poet, he seized the parables of the Scrip- 
tures, the doctrines of the Church, the 
religious legends of the people, and even 
the heathen myths, and wrought them 
into these " autos " for the salvation of 
his countrymen. They might, indeed, 
rather be called moralities than mysteries. 
Every incident is arranged with almost 
mathematical precision, to the end that 
a moral may be taught. Lope de Vega, 
Calderon's predecessor, had done much 
to elevate the stage of the people ; but 
Calderon, at once priest and dramatist, 
found both his vocations joined in the 
composition of his " autos." He could 
preach his sermons more effectively to 
the eye than to the ear. The Germans 
recognized the genius of Calderon with 



178 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

great cordiality, and Schiller regretted 
that he had not read him in earlier life. 
For a long time the only translations of 
any of these " autos " were in German. 
Until Denis Florence MacCarthy Eng- 
lished the " Sorceries of Sin " none of the 
"autos" of Calderon had appeared in an 
English garb. Dean Trench had given 
an analysis of " The Great Theatre of the 
World," and several scenes, and Mr. 
Ticknor and others had given analyses 
of '' autos " ; " but," as Mr. MacCarthy 
says in his introduction to " The Sorce- 
ries," " the ' autos,* the most wonderful 
of all his productions, and the only ones, 
with but two exceptions, which the great 
poet himself thought worthy of revision, 
have been passed over, I may say, in 
almost utter silence." 

The Germans, enthusiastic as they have 
shown themselves over the secular plays 
of Calderon, shrank from the task which 
Mr. MacCarthy completed with such 
thorough success. The characters in 
" Los Encantos de la Culpa," which is 
called a " sacramental allegorical auto," 
are the Man, Sin, Voluptuousness, Flat- 
tery, the Understanding, Penance, the 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 179 

Smell, the Hearing, the Touch, the Taste, 
musicians, and chorus. The scene opens 
to the sound of the trumpet. A ship is 
discovered at sea. In it are the Man, 
the Understanding, and the Five Senses. 
The Understanding warns the Man that 
he is afloat on the world's wide sea and 
that a mighty tempest threatens him. 
The Senses then declare their characters, 
and act the part of the crew during the 
tempest, with wonderful dramatic spirit. 
The character of the play and its motive, 
in the hands of so religious a poet as 
Calderon, may be gathered from the title 
and the names of the dramatis persons. 
But no analysis could do justice to the 
originality, the beauty, the simplicity, 
and the intense dramatic quality of this 
poetical drama. In this "auto" as in 
several others, Calderon uses the Greek, 
mythology in a manner which shows his 
skill and his deep religious feeling. His 
fervor fuses the Christian religion and 
the myths, so that their pagan character 
is entirely lost. In the hands of a poet 
like Camoens the myths, mingled with 
Christian personages and symbols, pro- 
duce a grotesque and profane effect. 



i8o THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Calderon seizes them boldly, as if by the 
divine right of a Christian. He illumines 
the faces of the gods with a new glory ; 
he causes the pipe of Pan to join in the 
heavenly chorus, and makes Orpheus, 
whose music gives a new sense to the 
beasts, a figure of our Lord. "The 
True God Pan " is the title of one ; an- 
other is founded on the story of Cupid 
and Psyche, and another on Ulysses 
and Circe. Most of his " autos " rest, 
however, on a Scriptural basis, such as 
"The Vineyard of the Lord," "The 
Wheat and the Tares," and "The Hid 
Treasures " ; others on Old Testament 
facts — " The Brazen Serpent," " Gid- 
eon's Fleece," " The Sheaves of Ruth," 
and " Balthasar's Feast " ; others, while 
strictly moral, are somewhat less Scrip- 
tural, — for instance, " Love the Greatest 
Enchantment " and " The Sorceries of 
Sin " are Christian dramatic allegories, 
both founded on the myth of Ulysses 
and Circe. 

The richness of imagery, the wealth 
of fancy, and the firmness of grasp which 
the poet shows in working out these 
marvellous acts make each a precious 



AND OTHER ESSAYS i8i 

heritage to poetry as well as to dramatic 
art. They are unique, and they merit 
a thorough study. A Catholic alone can 
sympathize with their spirit and revel in 
the deep religious life which fills them. 
A speech of Penance to Sin in *' Los 
Encantos de la Culpa " will give an idea 
of the beauty of the drama. This pas- 
sage loses nothing of its beauty in Mr. 
MacCarthy's interpretation : 

I, 

Erst who wore the rainbow's dress. 
Who if in a car triumphal 
Thou to-day behold' st me seated 
'Neath a canopy, wherein 
Purple, pearl, and gold are blended, 
'Tis because I come to triumph 
Over thee ; for whensoever 
Calleth me Man's Understanding, 
Never is the call neglected. 
All the virtues which he squandered 
In his ignorance demented 
I have here regathered, since 
Certain 'tis that when presented 
By the hand of Grace they 've been. 
He who turneth back repentant 
Ever findeth them again. 
Safely guarded and preserved. 
And that Man may know that they 
Can alone thy sorceries render 
Powerless, thou wilt now behold 



i82 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

All the viands here collected 

Vanish into air, and leave 

Naught behind to tell their presence ; 

Showing thus how human glory 

Is as false as evanescent. 

Since the only food that lasteth 

Is the food for souls intended — 

Is the eternal Bread of Life 

Which now fills this table's centre. 

It is Penance that presents it. 

Since without her (naught more certain) 

Man deserveth not to witness 

So much glory manifested. 

Yet, ye Senses, 'tis not bread. 

But a substance most transcendent : 

It is Flesh and Blood ; because 

When the substance is dissevered 

From the species, the White Host (^Hostu 

bianco) then 
But the accidents preserveth. 

Sin. How canst thou expect to gain 
Credence from thy outraged Senses, 
When they come to understand 
How you wrong them and offend them ? 
Smell, come here, and with thy sense 
Taste this bread, this substance ; tell me. 
Is it bread or flesh ? 

( The Senses approach, ) 

The Smell. Its smell 
Is the smell of bread. 

Sin. Taste, enter. Try it thou. 

The Taste. Its taste is plainly 
That of bread. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 183 

Sin. Touch, come. Why tremble ? 
Say what 's this thou touchest ? 

The Touch. Bread. 

Sin. Sight, declare what thou discernest 
In this object. 

7'he Sight. Bread alone. 

Sin. Hearing, thou, too, break in pieces 
This material, which, as fle§h. 
Faith proclaims and Penance preacheth ; 
Let the fraction, by its noise. 
Of their error undeceive them. 
Say, is it so ? 

Tbe Hearing. Ungrateful Sin, 
Though the noise in truth resembles 
That of bread when broken, yet 
Faith and Penance teach us better 
It is flesh, and what they call it 
I believe : that Faith asserteth 
Aught is proof enough thereof. 

The Understanding. This one reason brings 
contentment 
Unto me. 

Penance. O Man ! why linger. 
Now that hearing hath firm fettered 
To the Faith thy Understanding ? 
Quick ! regain the saving vessel 
Of the Sovereign Church, and leave 
Sin's so briefly sweet excesses. 
Thou, Ulysses, Circe's slave. 
Fly this false and fleeting revel. 
Since how great her power may be. 
Greater is the power of Heaven, 
And the true Jove's mightier magic 
Will thy virtuous purpose strengthen. 



i84 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

The Man. Yes, thou 'rt right, O Understanding! 
Lead in safety hence my Senses. 

All. Let us to our ship ; for here 
All is shadowy and unsettled. 

Sin. What imports it, woe is me ! — 
What imports it that my sceptre 
Thus you seem to 'scape from, since 
My enchantments will attend you ? 
I shall rouse the waves to madness. 

Penance. I shall follow and appease them. 

{Trumpets peal. The ship is discover edy and all 
go on board.') 

The "auto" ends with the triumph 
of Penance over the enchantments of 
Circe, and, this new Ulysses having 
escaped, the dramatis persons sing: 

Let this mightiest miracle 

Over all the world be feted. 

Specially within Madrid, 

City where Spain's proud heart swelleth. 

Which, in honoring God's body. 

Takes the foremost place for ever. 

In another "auto," "The Great The- 
atre of the World," Calderon takes for 
his theme, 

En el teatro del mundo 
Todos son representados, 

which Shakespeare had already rendered: 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 185 

All the world 's a stage. 
And all the men and women merely players. 

In the beginning the author summons his 
people, the Rich Man, the Beggar, the 
King, the Husbandman, the Beauty, the 
Hermit, or Discretion, and the Infant. 
They receive their parts from him, with 
the words. 

Act your best, for God is God, 

and a sublime drama of life goes on. 
Dean Trench ^ has given an interesting 
analysis of this " auto," to which we refer 
the reader who is too indolent to rub up 
his Spanish. 

Calderon was born in 1600, either in 
the beginning of January or February, 
although his friend Vera Tassis makes 
the year of his birth 1601. " Los Hijos 
de Madrid" (Calderon first saw the light 
in Madrid) gives February 14, 1600, as 
the day of his baptism. Another work 
quoted by Dean Trench, " Obelisco Fu- 
nebre," states, on the authority of the poet 
himself, that he was born January 17, 
1600. His parents, according to the 

1 Calderon, by R. C. Trench. 



i86 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

chronicles of the time, were Christian and 
prudent people, who, being of illustrious 
lineage, gave their children an education 
in conformity with it. His father held a 
State office under PhiHp II and Philip III. 
Don Pedro, the poet, was the youngest 
of four children. His brother Diego 
succeeded to the family estate, his sister 
entered the Order of St. Clare, and Jose 
fell in battle in 1645. -^^ learned the 
rudiments in the Jesuit College of Ma- 
drid. Afterwards he studied — some bi- 
ographers say for five years — philosophy 
and theology at the famous University of 
Salamanca. No one can read any play 
of Calderon's without being impressed 
with the deeply religious bent of his mind, 
and with the evidence of theological study 
which each of them displays. To the 
Summa of St. Thomas he owed all that cer- 
tainty and firmness in grasping the great 
questions of life which was the despair 
of Schiller and the admiration of Goethe. 
Well might Augustus Schlegel, who, un- 
like his brother Frederick, had not ac- 
cepted the Church, exclaim: "Blessed 
man ! he had escaped from the wild 
labyrinths of doubt into the stronghold 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 187 

of belief; thence, with undisturbed tran- 
quillity of soul, he beheld and portrayed 
the storms of the world. To him human 
life was no longer a dark riddle." 

When the crown fell from Shake- 
speare's dying head in England, Calderon 
had scarcely begun to sing in Spain. He 
lived to pass the threescore and ten allot- 
ted to man by eleven years. While the 
drama degenerated into spectacular and 
intellectually valueless shows in Spain, 
it likewise degenerated in England into 
the bastard, the soulless, the heartless 
comedy of the Restoration. He Hved 
to see the Spanish theatre, which he had 
built, following Lope de Vega, to a most 
noble height, become a mere vehicle for 
tours de force of scenic effects. And he 
does not seem to have been conscious 
of this degradation. He even helped it 
along. 

Nothing could have been more repel- 
lent to his nature than the polished yet 
open obscenity of the English comedies 
in vogue in his latter years. He would 
have been quick to perceive the evil 
tendency of- the wit of Congreve and 
Wycherley, and to raise his voice against 



i88 . THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

it ; but he failed to see that the splendid 
spectacles which he offered to the eyes of 
the court on the great pond of the Buen 
Retiro were as ruinous to the intellectual 
enjoyment of the drama as licentiousness 
and frivolity. To the glory of this most 
noble-minded of poets it must be said 
that no double entente^ no vile allusion or 
coarse pun such as Shakespeare felt him- 
self too often bound to introduce, often 
making of great passages " sweet bells 
jangled," ever appears in the works of 
Calderon. Yet Calderon was the bold- 
est of dramatists — bolder, because purer 
and without any self-conscious delight in 
shocking his audience, than the boldest 
of the French Romanticists. 

" The Devotion of the Cross," a 
powerful drama, contains scenes which 
in a less firm and pure hand would have 
left that sense of despair which we feel 
at the end of a great Greek play when 
the Fates have done their work. The 
impression derived from Sismondi that 
this sublime play turns on the crime of 
incest is false ; and it is surprising that 
even the most careless reader could have 
failed to see that Eusebio and Julia, guilty 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 189 

though they were, were saved from this 
unutterable crime. And in the scene, as 
translated by Mr. MacCarthy, in which 
they are saved, the masterly character of 
Calderon's art shows itself. It requires 
the highest purity of purpose and the 
aid of great genius to produce the effect 
of horror on the spectator's mind — the 
horror which the witness of a great crime 
feels — without vulgarizing the intensity 
of the horror or degrading the audience 
by forcing them to sympathize momen- 
tarily with the crime. 

Another Spanish writer possessed this 
high purpose and this art, though in her 
case talent supplied the place of genius. 
Readers of " La Gaviota " of Fernan 
Caballero will remember instances of it. 
It is easy to make an audience thrill with 
sympathy for temptation, or crime which 
is the result of passion, and the effects of 
too many of the romantic dramatists have 
been produced in this cheap way ; but it 
is not easy to cause the sin to be abhorred 
while the audience is still in sympathy 
with those who are on the verge of com- 
mitting it. Calderon, of all dramatists, 
was master of the means of producing 



190 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

this effect. Pure as his intent always 
was, and thoroughly Catholic as he every- 
where shows himself to be, yet he did not 
hesitate to touch the most secret springs 
of passion. A skilful master of stage 
tricks, he was never misled into vulgar 
and easy effects. All his situations were 
planned most artfully, nothing was left to 
chance ; and consequently the interest lies 
in the action of the drama, not in its 
characters. Calderon was a court poet 
and dramatist, and the result of habitual 
contact with the members of the most 
ceremonious and stately court in Europe 
is often apparent in his plays. 

It is, therefore, amusing to read Vol- 
taire*s complaints of the natural and un- 
cultivated nature of the Spanish drama ; 
and Voltaire's opinion of the Spanish 
drama is as valuable as his allusion to 
Hamlet as "a drunken Dane." Nothing 
could be more artificial than the structure 
of Calderon's dramas. They are geomet- 
rical in their precision ; some of them 
seem to be founded on a scholastic for- 
mula ; but nevertheless Calderon probes 
the depth of the human heart and holds 
in his discipHned hand the key to all the 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 191 

passions. French critics, always having 
the reverence for their Louis Quatorze 
imitations of the Greek drama before 
their eyes, could not appreciate Calderon. 
They found him too spontaneous, almost 
savage, because his rules of dramatic art 
differed from theirs. 

Dean Trench quotes a critical opinion 
from a book published in Paris in 1669, 
" Journal de Voyage d'Espagne,*' in which 
the complacent French traveller says : 
" Yesterday came the Marquis of Eliche, 
eldest son of Don Luis De Haro, and 
Monsieur de Barriere, and took me to the 
theatre. The play, which had been before 
brought forward but was newly revived, was 
naught, although it had Don Pedro Cal- 
deron for author. At a later hour I made 
a visit to this Calderon, who is held the 
greatest poet and most illustrious genius 
in Spain at the present day. He is knight 
of the Order of Santiago and chaplain to 
the Chapel of the Kings at Toledo ; but 
I gathered from his conversation that his 
head-piece was furnished poorly enough. 
We disputed a good while on the rules 
of the drama, which in this land are not 
recognized, and about which the Spaniards 



192 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

make themselves merry." But the critic 
of to-day, recalling how Calderon, in spite 
of his strict rules and courtly elegance, 
touched the hearts of the common people, 
will differ from the French interviewer and 
thank Heaven that this Spanish poet tri- 
umphed over more hampering regulations 
than ever bound Racine or Corneille. 

The boldness with which he handled 
his motifs and characters excited the ill 
nature and reckless censure of Sismondi, 
who finds in " The Devotion of the 
Cross " much that would be, if it were 
there, abominable. " On devine sans 
peine que Julia est la soeur d'Eusebe ; 
et cette invention dramatique augmen- 
tant d'intensite irait coudoyer I'horreur et 
rinsoutenable, si Calderon n'etait doue 
de ce vrai genie dont I'essence est pure. 
Nous allons le voir, dans une occasion 
si difficile retrouver la moralite qui lui 
est propre, la sublime pudeur qui ne 
I'abandonne jamais. Ses ailes blanches 
et vierges trempent dans Forage sans le 
fletrir, et effleurent la foudre sans se 
bruler.'* The truth of this last beautiful 
sentence is often forced upon the reader. 
The " white and spotless wings " of this 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 193 

genius flutter amid darkness and storm 
unsullied and unruffled. In a turmoil 
of passion and jealousy, such as " Phy- 
sician of his Own Honor/* of which there 
is a French version, he remains calm and 
pure while his hearers shudder with hor- 
ror. His plays of which jealousy is the 
theme seem to have been torn from a 
living and burning heart. They are al- 
most unendurably horrible, yet they are 
wonders of dramatic art; and in the 
warring of the elements Calderon never 
changes his plan or loses his grasp. Either 
the taste of the Spanish court was much 
less coarse than that of the English, or 
Calderon's elevating studies of the Summa 
must have made him disdain low things ; 
for although Cervantes and, it is said, the 
pleasant farceur y Tirso de Molina, often 
made allusions which in any age would 
have been considered indecent, Calderon's 
works are free from these blots. 

Senor Hartzenbusch tells us that Cal- 
deron was nineteen when he left Salamanca, 
and surmises that " The Devotion of the 
Cross " was written before he left the 
University. In it he expresses the dif- 
ficulty of pleasing an audience variously 
13 



194 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

composed, in the speech beginning, 
" Copla hay tambien para ti," etc. 

Take this rhyme along with thee : 
Since, howe'er the poet tries. 
Doubtful is his drama's fate. 
For what may the crowd elate 
The judicious may despise. 
If you 're seeking for fame's prizes. 
Try some method less remote. 
For 't is hard to cut a coat 
That will suit all sorts of sizes. 

Calderon did not despise the applause 
of the populace because he wrote for the 
approbation of the knights. He pleased 
both. He interested the people, in spite 
of themselves, in the heroism that the 
Moors had displayed ; this was not the 
least of his triumphs. " The Chariot of 
Heaven," his first play, written when he 
was fourteen, has not come down to us. 
At the age of twenty-five we find him 
serving in the Low Countries as a soldier, 
as Cervantes and Garcilasso the lyric poet 
and other Spanish writers had served. 
In 1625 he was still in the army, if his 
" Siege of Breda," a military drama, may 
stand as evidence of his presence at the 
taking of that town. Philip IV, a litterateur 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 195 

and a lover of the drama, summoned 
him to court. In 1630 Lope de Vega 
acknowledged that his mantle had fallen 
on the poet-soldier, and on Lope's death, 
{ivQ years later, there was no one left 
to dispute the bays with Calderon. Cal- 
deron was a favorite at court. His lines 
were cast in pleasant places. The light 
of the courtly glare in which he lived did 
not wither his genius ; it was good for 
him ; he throve in the splendor, and 
flourished. Unlike so many of his breth- 
ren, he had no struggles with fate. The 
spectacular pieces which his position as 
director of the court theatre in the palace 
of the Buen Retiro forced him to prepare 
are the weakest and the most unsatisfac- 
tory of his productions. 

Ben Jonson's masques, which were fash- 
ionable at the English court at this time, 
were somewhat similar, but in som^ re- 
spects more meritorious. Calderon, who 
doubtless felt the arrangement of these 
magnificent shows a heavy task, avenged 
himself by torturing the stage machinist. 
" Circe," which was represented on the 
great pond of the Buen Retiro on St. 
John's Night, 1635, ^^ accompanied with 



196 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

most elaborate directions which would 
drive the very modern stage manager to 
despair. Here is a sample : 

"In the midst of this island will be situated 
a very lofty mountain of rugged ascent, with 
precipices and caverns, surrounded by a thick 
and darksome wood of tall trees, some of which 
will be seen to exhibit the appearance of the 
human form covered with a rough bark, from 
the heads and arms of which will issue green 
boughs and branches, having suspended from 
them, various trophies of war and of the chase, 
the theatre, during the opening of the scene, 
being scantily lit with concealed lights ; and, to 
make a beginning of the festival, a murmuring 
and a rippling noise of water having been heard, 
a great and magnificent car will be seen to 
advance along the pond, plated over with silver, 
and drawn by two monstrous fishes, from whose 
mouths will continually issue great jets of water, 
the light of the theatre increasing according as 
they advance ; and on the summit of it will be 
seated in great pomp and majesty the goddess 
Aqua, from whose head and curious vesture 
will issue an infinite abundance of little con- 
duits of water ; and at the same time will be 
seen another great supply flowing from an urn 
which the goddess will hold reversed, and which, 
filled with a variety of fishes, that, leaping and 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 197 

playing in the torrent as it descends and gliding 
over all the car, will fall into the pond." 

This is only a glimmer of the wonders 
to follow. Calderon spared no expense 
on these spectacles, and the king seems to 
have been lavish in his expenditures for 
adding decorations and mechanism of the 
newest pattern to the paraphernalia of 
the court theatre. Being a member of the 
military order of Santiago, Calderon en- 
tered the iield in 1637 to help to suppress 
a revolt in one of the provinces. How 
long he remained in the army is not cer- 
tain ; it is plain, however, that Philip IV 
preferred that he should remain at court. 
He gave up the pursuit of arms, although 
he still clung to that of literature, and 
received holy orders. His genius was of 
so sacred a kind that he needed not to 
throw aside his pen to take up the cross. 
His works were psalms, and he only 
needed the added grace of the Christian 
priesthood to make him a perfect sym- 
bol of Catholic art. His life had been 
calm and happy — or as calm and happy 
as the life of such a man, whose eyes were 
fixed on God and who knew no real 



198 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

contentment not seeing God, could be. 
On Whitsunday, May 25, 168 1, he died, 
no longer a court favorite, — for Philip 
had died in 1665, — but revered and loved. 
He was buried in the Church of San 
Salvadore at Madrid. The glimpses 
which we get of him from his contempora- 
ries are few, but they make us feel that 
his life was noble and that his works 
reflected it. His relations with Lope de 
Vega and Cervantes (he dramatized " Don 
Quixote ") were friendly and cordial. 
Not much is known of his ways among 
men, but what is known shows him to be 
a high type of a high and noble people. 

With Calderon died the glory of Spain. 
Lope de Vega had modelled the statue 
out of rude stone, which Calderon had 
completed. Out of the national life of 
Spain had come the strong impulse which 
gave a new drama to the world, to take 
its place proudly beside the drama of 
Greece and the drama of England ; which 
gave a New World to the Old, and drew 
from this New World those glittering 
streams that gilded but could not revive 
it. Materialism had hidden the cross and 
dimmed the old Spanish ideal. The 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 199 

gorgeous trappings of the body had 
almost smothered the soul. Calderon 
making spectacles for the court, while the 
enemies of Spain were dismembering her, 
and her soldiers in new lands sowing the 
seeds of hatred in the name of God, 
whom their lust outraged, was a symbol 
of his country, forgetting the ideal of 
other days and substituting for it empty 
splendor and worthless gold. 



IMITATORS OF SHAKESPEARE 



IMITATORS OF SHAKESPEARE 

STUDENTS of literature are of one 
mind, even in the face of the vogue 
of Rostand's " Cyrano de Berge- 
rac," Phillips's " Ulysses," and Shaw's 
'' Candida," as to the evident decay of 
the literary element in most of the plays 
successfully performed at the theatres. 
The French still listen with respect to the 
masterpieces of Racine, Corneille, and 
Moliere, but we must remember that the 
Comedie Fran^atse is a subsidized theatre. 
Moliere was, like Shakespeare, both a 
man of letters and an actor. He knew 
the turn of the literary phrase, but he 
knew also how to give his phrase the 
dramatic touch without which the most 
splendid poetry fails echoless from the 
stage. Shakespeare had the dramatic 
power and the theatrical skill, and yet 
so different were the requirements of 
the Elizabethan stage from ours that no 
modern manager except Mr. Ben Greet 



204 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

dares to put a play of Shakespeare's, for- 
ward without various necessary changes, 
and even he must " cut '* many lines. 
Even so careful a manager as the late 
Mr. Augustin Daly took out the fine 
speech of the first lord in " As You 
Like It " ^ because it impedes the action 
of the play. Eloquence as eloquence, 
poetry as poetry, does not count on the 
modern stage. Words are no longer held 
to be the principal symbols which the 
dramatist must use for the presentation 
of his ideas. It is the psychological value 
of muscular expression — of action and 
the suggestion of emotion — that he must 
weigh. 

He learns the value of the pause, of the 
glance of the eye, of the trembling of the 
hand, of the laugh, of the sob ; he gauges 
the effect of silence itself; but for long 
speeches, for soliloquies that are merely 
eloquent or poetical, he has no use. 
They will not do. You may argue that 
this condition of affairs means degen- 
eracy, and you will be met with Pro- 
fessor Brander Matthews's reply, — that 
the drama, as well as the other arts of 

1 Act II, Sc. 1. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 205 

sculpture and painting and music, ought 
not to be judged from a literary point of 
view. The dramatic quality may cause a 
play to live for the hour, and only for the 
hour; the literary quality gives it perma- 
nence; it is this quality which makes it 
eventually a classic. Professor Brander 
Matthews says : 

"Nobody disputes that dramatic literature 
must be literature, although there are not a few 
who do not insist that it must be dramatic. 
The great dramatists have accepted this double 
obligation, and they have always recognized that 
the stage of the theatre, and not the desk of the 
library, is the true proving room. This double 
obligation it is that makes the drama so difficult 
an art, perhaps, indeed, the most difficult of all 
arts." 

The great dramatists to whom Pro- 
fessor Brander Matthews alludes are easily 
enumerated, and they are very great in- 
deed, — Calderon, Lope de Vega, Shake- 
speare, Racine, Corneille, Schiller, Moliere, 
and Goldsmith ; for Goldsmith in " She 
Stoops to Conquer " has left us at least 
one play that answers both the literary 
and the dramatic tests. Scores of other 



2o6 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

dramatists who held the theatre in their day 
and delighted their fellows are forgotten. 
Before the footlights their characters lived ; 
in the book-shelves they are very like 
the dried sea-weed, which takes on color 
and life only in its congenial element. 
Taken from the stage, they have no life, 
no interest ; they are as dry as the dust in 
which they repose. 

On the other hand, there are scores of 
brilliant dramas which live only in the let- 
ter; which, although not written for the 
closet, can be endured only in the study. 
They contain the highest poetry, the most 
thrilling eloquence ; they are talked about 
rather than read. And when one hears a 
line from them, one is rather certain to be 
able to trace it to a dictionary of quota- 
tions. And these noble works of poetic 
art are forgotten, except as to their names, 
because their authors were poets, but not 
dramatists. The conditions of the stage 
have changed, and Sophocles and Shake- 
speare and Racine do not fit well in the 
atmosphere of our modern theatre. The 
method of Shakespeare, who is careful to 
indicate locality and time and physical sur- 
roundings in his text, is the method of 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 207 

the modern novelist rather than of the 
modern dramatist ; hence the necessity of 
" adapting " him to the exigencies of the 
modern theatre; just as a novel, no matter 
how much essential dramatic quality there 
may be in it, must be arranged for the stage. 
The essential dramatic quality is impor- 
tant, but an acting play must succeed or 
fall through the presentment of the dra- 
matic quality. " It is the vast power a 
good actor has In this way," Sir Henry 
Irving said, in his address before the Phil- 
osophical Institute of Edinburgh, "which 
has led the French to speak of creating 
a part when they mean its first being 
played ; and the French authors are so 
conscious of the extent and value of this 
cooperation of actors with them, that they 
have never objected to the phrase, but, on 
the contrary, are uniformly lavish in their 
homage to the artists who have created 
on the boards the parts which they them- 
selves have created on paper." 

The characters, then, are conceived by 
the author ; they are grouped by him in 
accordance v/ith the dramatic laws of logic 
and movement ; but unless he knows these 
laws, unless he can project himself Into the 



2o8 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

minds of his auditors, unless he is sure 
that contrast and action are his main tools, 
he cannot succeed in making a drama for 
the stage. He must be capable of per- 
ceiving the dramatic worth of our knowl- 
edge that Lady Teazle is behind the screen 
in that marvellously constructed scene in 
Sheridan's " School for Scandal " ; he can 
leave nothing to chance, as Shakespeare 
leaves nothing to chance in the trial scene 
in "The Merchant of Venice"; but he 
must leave much to interpretation. 

On the other hand, the names of Shel- 
ley, Sir tienry Taylor, Browning, Swin- 
burne, and the two De Veres, must be 
uttered by men of letters with respect ; and 
yet they failed as dramatists. They pro- 
duced " closet " dramas, — dramas invented 
for a stage that does not exist, modelled on 
Elizabethan forms, without the inner power 
of appealing to the dramatic sense. As 
dramas, " The Cenci " of Shelley, " A 
Blot in the 'Scutcheon," " Strafford," and 
"Luria," of Browning, "Mary Stuart" 
and " Chastelard " of Swinburne, " Philip 
van Artevelde" and " Edwin the Fair" of 
Sir Henry Taylor, the " Mary Tudor " of 
Sir Aubrey de Vere, the " Alexander the 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 209 

Great " and " St. Thomas of Canterbury " 
of Aubrey Thomas de Vere, the " Queen 
Mary '* and " Becket " of Tennyson, are 
" closet " dramas. To quote Mr. Craw- 
ford's happy phrase, they are plays for a 
"pocket theatre." Of all these great men 
Tennyson made the most violent effort 
to be theatrical, and a very great fail- 
ure. '' Harold " and " Queen Mary " and 
" Becket " are neither great poems nor 
great dramas. Shelley's " Cenci," in spite 
of the repellent subject, is a classic, — 
beautiful, glowing, terrible. Browning's 
" Strafford " and " Luria " and " A Blot 
in the 'Scutcheon " are literature, but they 
have not the acting quality ; they are 
not objective. " His stage," Mr. Henry 
Brown says, in " Browning as a Dramatic 
Poet," "is filled with moral agents in a 
state of moral tension, not with men and 
women who are ilesh and blood as well 
as spirit." Swinburne's tragedies are hard 
reading, though full of eloquence and lyr- 
ical quality, and the " Philip van Arte- 
velde " of Sir Henry Taylor and " Mary 
Tudor " of Sir Aubrey de Vere, have 
some magnificent poetical passages, but 
they lack every requirement for the acting 
14 



210 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

play. "Richelieu" and "The Lady of 
Lyons," though they hold the stage, are 
not literature, nor is " Caste," or " Held 
by the Enemy," or " The Way of the 
World,"' or "The Henrietta," or "Ala- 
bama," or " Shore Acres," or any of the 
popular favorites ; but they are plays which 
appeal to us as the orator appeals to us, — 
for an hour or two, and then the fire dies 
away. 

Permit me to compare two plays written 
by two very great poets, — Tennyson's 
" Becker" and Aubrey Thomas de Vere's 
" St. Thomas of Canterbury," to show 
that the highest poetical quality will not 
save a noble play from being of the 
"closet," that is, study type, and that the 
poet who tries to make a great subject 
dramatic by lowering it to what he deems 
to be the popular theatrical demand, fails. 
Tennyson sacrificed the truth of history 
and the truth of character in attempting 
to theatricalize the character of Thomas 
of Canterbury, with the consequence that, 
if " Becket " and the dramas in which he 
has followed a similar process were lost, 
his reputation would be the better for it. 

I Clyde Fitch. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 211 

In picturesqueness and grace the 
" Becket " of the late laureate is vastly 
superior to the one which, after " Alexan- 
der the Great," has made Aubrey Thomas 
de Vere's name glorious in the literary 
annals of the nineteenth century. But a 
great tragedy on a subject which is what 
the Germans call " epoch-making " de- 
mands higher qualities than picturesque- 
ness and that nameless grace and delicacy 
so essentially Tennysonian. It needs 
even higher qualities than the contrast 
of marked characters, pointed epigrams, 
or the fine play of poetic fancy. Lord 
Tennyson's " Becket " has all the lower 
qualities, Aubrey Thomas de Vere's " St. 
Thomas of Canterbury " all the higher. 
An oak is not more of an oak because 
the sward around is starred by violets and 
all the blooms of Spring ; and De Vere's 
" St. Thomas " would not be a greater 
tragedy if it had the exquisite touches 
which the most delicate master of poetic 
technique the world has ever seen gave to 
" Becket." 

Tennyson's tragedy is meant to be 
an acting play ; De Vere's is, frankly, 
a drama for the study. The lack of 



212 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

nobility in Tennyson's is due to the 
necessity he felt of making it fit the 
arbitrary refinements of the stage. 

The episode of Fair Rosamond, which 
is an offence against historical truth, good 
art, and taste, would never have been in- 
troduced had the late laureate not been 
required to give a leading dramatic lady 
something to do. Still, writers impreg- 
nated with certain prejudices are always 
crying, Cherchez la femme. If a man is 
holy, and there is no disputing the fact, 
they construct a romance with a woman in 
it to account for his renunciations. Ten- 
nyson has ruined a magmfLCQUt persona by 
making him, on the eve of his death for 
Christianity and liberty, drivel of what he 
might have gained had he married. In 
the monastery at Canterbury, just before 
the tolling of the bell that calls him to his 
doom, he sighs ; 

There was a little fair-haired Norman maid 
Lived in my mother's house : if Rosamond is 
The world's rose, as her name imports her, she 
Was the world's lily. 

yob/i of Salisbury. Ay, and what of her ? 

Becket. She died of leprosy. 

John of Salisbury. I know not why 

You call these old things back, my lord. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 213 

Becket. The drowning man, they say, remembers 
all 
The chances of his life, just ere he dies. 

Surely the poet who gave us a type of 
purity in Sir Galahad, and of chaste eleva- 
tion in King Arthur, might have better 
understood the character of the successor 
of St. Anselm. It is impossible to ap- 
proach the climax, or rather anti-climax, 
of Tennyson's play without impatience 
and irritation. If 

To be wroth with one we love 
Doth work like madness in the brain, 

the discovery that a true poet has misun- 
derstood a grand character and frittered 
away a sublime opportunity is an incen- 
tive, too, to a helpless, hopeless sort of 
anger. 

In De Vere's "St. Thomas" there is 
no anti-climax, no disappointment. We 
miss sometimes the flowers that might 
grow around the foot of the oak, but the 
oak towers majestic. " St. Thomas " pos- 
sesses what many of us thought lacking in 
the less ambitious poems of an author who 
has given out much light without heat, 
sustained intensity of passion. Added to 



214 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

this, De Vere thoroughly understood the 
historical meaning of St. Thomas's time, 
and the relations of the great Chancellor 
and Primate to that time. Of these the 
laureate seemed to be in the densest igno- 
rance, or he hid his knowledge for theat- 
rical effect. If in " Queen Mary " he drew 
his facts from Froude, and in " Harold," 
it seems, from Bulwer Lytton, he appears 
in "Becket" to have depended on his 
own inner consciousness for his history. 
He has in the most important particulars 
ignored the authentic chronicles of his 
time. 

It was, indeed, an " epoch-making " 
time, and one worthy of a grand com- 
memoration in an immortal poem. Eng- 
land owed her liberty to the Church ; and 
more than all, to St. Anselm and St. 
Thomas, because they first withstood the 
advancing waves of royal despotism. 
And the freedom of the Church was the 
freedom of the people. St. Anselm put 
into the " Mariale " the echoes of the 
wails of the Saxon people, beaten down 
by alien conquerors. The Saxons saw 
their priests made powerless, their Church 
enslaved, and themselves in hopeless 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 215 

serfdom, when suddenly that Christianity 
which knows no nationality, which fuses 
all nations into one, asserted her might in 
the persons of two primates, — one of the 
conquering race, the other of the foreign- 
er's court. The position of St. Thomas a 
Becket has been misinterpreted so utterly 
that he is often set down as an ambitious 
revolutionist who tried, in the interests of 
ecclesiastical tyranny, to dominate both 
King and people. In truth, the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury struggled for old 
English laws against new ones devised by 
the Normans to rivet more closely the 
fetters of serfdom on the Saxon people. 

It has been made a reproach against St. 
Thomas that he resisted the " Royal 
Customs," that he figured as a haughty 
prince of the Church scorning the preten- 
sions of the Plantagenet, and that he died 
a martyr to his obstinate desire to crush 
even royal freedom, that he and his 
monks might triumph. This view is 
founded on a misconception of the nature 
of the Royal Customs. They were not 
old Customs, but innovations invented by 
the conquerors for their autocratic pur- 
poses. De Vere puts into Becket's 



2i6 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

mouth a graphic description of these 
famous Customs. The Earl of Cornwall 

says : 

You serve the king 
Who stirred these wars ? who spurned the Royal 

Customs ? 
- Becket, The Customs — ay, the Customs ? We 

have reached 
At last — 't was time — the inmost of this plot. 
Till now so deftly veiled and ambushed. " Customs *' ! 

specious word, how plausibly abused ! 
In Catholic ears that word is venerable ; 
To Catholic souls custom is law itself. 

Law that its own foot hears not, dumbly treading 
A holy path smoothed by traditions old. 

1 war not, sirs, on way traditionary ; 

The Church of Christ herself is a tradition ; 

Ay, 'tis God's tradition, not of men ! 

Sir, these your Customs are God's laws reversed. 

Traditions making void the Word of God, 

Old innovations from the first withstood. 

The rights of holy Church, the poor man's portion. 

Sold, and for naught, to aliens. Customs ! Customs ! 

Custom was that which to the lord of the soil 

Yielded the virgin one day wedded ! Customs ! 

A century they have lived ; but he ne'er lived. 

The man that knew their number or their scope. 

Where found, by whom begotten, or how named : 

Like malefactors long they hid in holes ; 

They walked in mystery hke the noontide pest ; 

In the air they danced; they hung on breath of 

princes. 
Largest when princes' Hves were most unclean. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 217 

And visible most when rankest was the mist. 
Sirs, I defy your Customs : they are naught. 
I turn from them to our old English laws. 
The Confessor's and those who went before him. 
The charters old, and sacred oaths of kings : 
I clasp the tables twain of Sinai : 
On them I lay my palms, my heart, my forehead, 
And on the altars dyed by martyrs' blood. 
Making to God appeal. 

These usages of tyranny were the Cus- 
toms that St. Thomas resisted to death. 
Indeed throughout the whole of his work 
De Vere departs from the chronicled truth 
in nothing, except in the episode of Idonea 
de Lisle, the ward of Becket's sister. 
Idonea, a rich heiress, pursued by the 
ruffianly knight De Broc, who "roamed 
a-preying on the race of men," took 
refuge with Becket's sister and was pro- 
tected by the power of the Primate. De 
Broc gained the King's ear, and, " on some 
pretence of law," drove Idonea from the 
house of Becket's sister. De Broc and 
his friends sued for her as a royal ward; 
judgment went against her, and we are 
told that she escaped only by becoming a 
postulant. 

Judgment against her went. The day had come. 
And round the minster knights and nobles watched : 



2i8 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

The chimes rang out at noon : then from the gate 
Becket walked forth, the maiden by his side : 
Ay, but her garb conventional showed the nun ! 
They frowned, but dared no more. 

The feminine interest, to give which to 
his tragedy Tennyson invented a new ver- 
sion of the legend of Fair Rosamond, is 
supplied by De Vere in this very fit- 
ting episode of Idonea. It is artistic and 
congruous, but unless put into action it 
would not do for the stage. Idonea is 
exiled from England when the King*s 
wrath bursts on all ^the relatives, friends, 
and dependants of A Becket ; she finds 
refuge with the Empress Matilda, mother 
of the King. Then occurs a scene between 
the Empress and the novice, which, for 
spiritual as well as intellectual elevation, 
has seldom been equalled. 

One would think that it would have 
been easy to give the necessary feminine 
element to " Becket " by the use of an 
underplot ; but Tennyson has preferred 
to bring the King's mistress, a "light o* 
love," Fair Rosamond, into intimate asso- 
ciation with the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury, whose purity, even before he took 
orders, amid all the temptations of the 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 219 

court, presided over by a loose-minded 
Proven9al Queen, was proverbial. Fair 
Rosamond is rehabilitated for the purpose 
of the laureate. She is made to be, in her 
own eyes, the lawful wife of King Henry ; 
and the Chancellor — not yet made Pri- 
mate — promises the King to protect her 
against the vengeance of Queen Eleanor. 

Becket, having become Primate and 
gained the hatred of the King, does so ; 
and, in a dagger-scene quite worthy of a 
sensational play, saves her from Eleanor's 
fury. After that he induces her to leave 
her son and begin a novitiate in Godstow 
convent, from which she emerges, with 
the consent of the abbess, disguised as a 
monk. She is thus present at the murder 
of the Archbishop, and her presence excites 
that tender retrospection so in keeping 
with theatrical traditions, but so shock- 
ingly contrary to the martyr's character 
and the truth of history. It is here that 
Becket says, according to Tennyson : 

Dan John, how much we lose, we celibates. 
Lacking the love of woman and of child ! 

John of Salisbury seeks to give the 
Archbishop consolation for his supposed 



220 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

loss, in a most ungallant and pessimistic 
tone smacking somewhat of" sour grapes," 
in which he reminds St. Thomas that he 
might have married the wrong woman. 

More gain than loss ; for of your wives you shall 

Find one slut, whose fairest linen seems 

Foul as her dust-cloth, if she used it ; one 

So charged with tongue, that every thread of thought 

Is broken ere it joins ; a shrew to boot. 

Whose evil song far on into the night 

Thrills to the topmost tile — no hope but death ; 

One slow, fat, white, a burthen of the hearth ; 

And one that, being thwarted, ever swoons 

And weeps herself into a place of power. 

This is hardly the way in which a 
sturdy and ascetic priest and counsellor 
would talk to an archbishop who, almost 
at the moment of martyrdom, would begin 
to look back at his " lost chances " of 
matrimony. How different, but how true, 
is the note struck by De Vere ! Becket 
has been just made Primate, and he bursts 
into a splendid speech to Herbert of 
Bosham : 

Herbert ! my Herbert ! 
High visions, mine in youth, upbraid me now ; 
I dreamed of sanctities redeemed from shame ; 
Abuses crushed ; all sacred offices 
Reserved for spotless hands. Again I see them ; 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 221 

r see God's realm so bright, each English home 

Showing that glory basks amid its peace : 

I see the clear flame on the poor man's hearth 

From God's own altar lit; the angelic childhood ; 

The chaste, strong youth ; the reverence of white hairs j 

'Tis this Religion means. O Herbert ! Herbert! 

We must secure her this. Her rights, the lowest. 

Shall in my hand be safe. I will not suffer 

The pettiest stone in castle, grange, or mill. 

The humblest clod of English earth, one time 

A fief of my great mother, Canterbury, 

To rest a caitiff's booty. Herbert, Herbert, 

Had I foreseen, with what a vigilant care 

Had I built up my soul ! 

Becket's pupil, young Prince Henry, is 
heard singing without, and the Archbishop 
says, in contrast to the whines put into 
his mouth by Tennyson : 

Hark to that truant's song ! We celibates 
Are strangely captured by this love of children. 
Nature's revenge — say, rather, compensation. 

Exiled in the Abbey of Pontigny, after 
the King has poured his wrath on him 
and his kindred for defending the liberties 
of the Church and the people, he does not 
break out into wild regret or sentimental 
sighs. There is a manly tenderness in 
his tone to the abbot: 



222 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

My mother, when I went to Paris first, 
A slender scholar bound on quest of learning. 
Girding my gown collegiate, wept full sore. 
Then laid on me this hest : Both early and late 
To love Christ's Mother and the poor of Christ. 
That so her prayer in heaven and theirs on earth. 
Beside me moving as I walked its streets. 
Might shield me from its sins. 

Abbot. Men say your mother 

Loved the poor well, and still on festivals. 
Lay her growing babe in counter-scale. 
Heaped up an equal weight of clothes and food. 
Which unto them she gave. 

De Vere*s conception of the motives of 
the martyred Primate is worthy of the 
subject. Tennyson grasps only faintly 
the Christianity of A Becket. In the 
dialogue between the Abbot of Pontigny 
and the exiled Archbishop, just quoted, 
there is an example of Christian belief 
which, like sustaining gold threads in a 
tissue of silk, runs through the wonder- 
ful tragedy of De Vere's. The Chan- 
cellor is made Primate ; he becomes less 
gay, less worldly, more given to the build- 
ing up of his soul and mind, and more 
spiritual. He, almost alone, stands up 
for the Church and the people. Time- 
serving court bishops cower ; the very 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 



223 



court of Rome — but not the Church 

— seems to desert him. The Pope him- 
self sends him the habit of the monks of 
Pontigny, with the cowl filled with snow 

— " the Pope knows well some heads are 
hot." The Archbishop endures it all 
with the meekness of a saint, yet with the 
dignity of a man. Through all trials, up to 
the time of martyrdom, he seems marked 
for special grace. He is not singularly 
learned, for the practical duties of the 
kingdom have left him little time for 
study. And yet he is well equipped with 
fortitude, and his hope never falters. 
Why ? We are answered : Because his 
mother has loved God and the poor, and 
because he so loves Christ's poor, fol- 
lowing her behest. This point is accentu- 
ated most sharply and artistically by the 
author. 

Tennyson draws very sharply the envi- 
ous and fawning prelates around the King, 
and his characterization is as keen and 
delicate as we have had every reason to 
expect it to be. But the virtuous priests 
in " Becket " are certainly a strange group. 
We know that the Church in England, 
half enslaved by the State and burdened 



224 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

with growing wealth, had need of reforms 
in discipline. De Vere, with a regard for 
truth which has probably caused guile- 
less non-Catholics to expect to see him 
crushed by the Thunder of Rome, accent- 
uates these facts. Matilda says: 

I would your primate 
Had let the Royal Custom be, and warred 
Against the ill customs of the Church. 'T is shame 
To ordain a clerk in name that lacks a cure. 
Whom idleness must needs ensnare in crime. 
Scandal — and worse — to screen an erring clerk. 
More fearing clamor than the cancer slow 
Of wily wasting sin. Scandal it is 
When seven rich benefices load one priest. 
Likeliest his soul's damnation. 

John of Salisbury. . Scandals indeed ! 

And no true friend to Thomas is the man. 
Who palliates such abuses. For this cause 
Reluctantly he grasped Augustine's staff. 
Therewith to smite them down. Madam, the men 
Who brand them most are those who breed the 

scandals. 
The Primate warred on such. The King to shield 

them. 
Invoked the Royal Customs. 

De Vere does not whiten the courtiers 
and sycophants, although clothed with 
episcopal authority, who shrank from St. 
Thomas at the King's scowl. He is even 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 225 

more pitiless to them than Tennyson. 
Tennyson, however, does not seem to see 
the anomaly of making an archbishop 
show an insubordinate and mutinous 
spirit, which almost justifies the hot words 
that King Henry is made to address to 
him : 

No ! God forbid, and turn me Mussulman ! 
No God but one, and Mahound is his prophet. 
But for your Christian, look you, you shall have 
None other God but me — me, Thomas, son 
Of Gilbert Becket, London merchant. 

It may be said that Tennyson's idea of 
St. Thomas is very human, and that the 
poet has well depicted in rushing words a 
proud nature towering and neither bending 
nor breaking. It is well enough painted 
from that point of view. There are some 
exquisitely fine natural touches. But the 
poet-laureate had no right to attempt to 
depict the character of St. Thomas merely 
from that point of view. Pride and en- 
thusiasm would never have made a Chris- 
tian martyr of Thomas a Becket, and it 
is the full understanding of this that, leav- 
ing out other qualities, makes De Vere the 
greater poet and truer delineator of a hero 
15 



226 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

whom it is almost sacrilege to misrepresent 
for the sake of a theatrical succ^s d'estime. 

The character of Thomas a Becket 
belongs to Christendom and to history, 
and the poet-laureate, rushing in where 
angels fear to tread, not caring for or 
understanding the sacredness of his sub- 
ject, did both Christendom and art a wrong 
by dragging an effigy of the martyred Pri- 
mate in the dust. It used to be the fash- 
ion to overlook the liberties that poets and 
romance-writers took with history ; but 
since historians have become romancers, 
and even adopted the adjectives of the 
poets, we are more exacting. No excuse 
can be offered for Tennyson's falsification 
of the character of A Becket, — so unUke 
that of Shakespeare's treatment of Wolsey, 
— not even an excuse that he needed dra- 
matic color. He had a noble figure and 
a sublime time, and he belittled them both, 
because he would not understand them, 
or because he was desirous of the applause 
of the frequenters of theatres. 

Tennyson causes the Pope's almoner to 
suggest treachery to the Archbishop when 
the King is urging him to sign the articles 
against the freedom of the Church, Philip 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 227 

de Eleemosyna tempts the Archbishop by 
whispering that the Pope wants him to 
do it: 

Cannot the Pope absolve thee if thou sign ? 

What plea can be offered for it in 
the careful, overwrought work of a poet 
whose fame is world-wide and whose 
sympathy should not have been much 
narrower ? 

Becket bursts out in this speech : 

Map scoffs at Rome. I all but hold with Map. 
Save for myself, no Rome were left in England : 
All had been his. Why should this Rome, this Rome, 
Still choose Barabbas rather than the Christ, 
Absolve the left-hand thief and damn the right ? 
Take fees of tyranny, wink at sacrilege. 
Which even Peter had not dared ? condemn 
The blameless exile .? 

Herbert of Bosham, the Archbishop*s 
faithful friend, a devout cleric and a sen- 
sible man, is made to drivel : 

Thee, thou holy Thomas, 
I would that thou hadst been the Holy Father. 

To which Tennyson's Archbishop com- 
placently replies ; 



228 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

I would have done my most to keep Rome holy : 
I would have made Rome know she still is Rome, 
Who stands aghast at her eternal self 
And shakes at mortal kings — 

Chronicles tell us that St. Thomas 
was serene and dignified in all trials, but 
" Becket's " serenity is frequently swept 
away in gusts of evil temper, and he 
is quite as foul-mouthed as the enemies 
that bait him. The prelates around him 
wrangle like school-boys, and the scene 
at Northampton is simply a free quarrel. 
De Vere comprehending that the key to 
St. Thomas's conduct must be found in 
a supernatural motive, avoids the almost 
brutal mistakes of the laureate. The 
scene of the signing of the Royal Customs 
by A Becket was really at Clarendon ; 
Tennyson transfers it to Roehampton. 
De Vere treats this scene with keen per- 
ception and admirable reticence. The 
Archbishop does not forget himself or 
burst*into violent assertions. He is made 
to explain the episode of the almoner, 
which Tennyson treats in a very different 
way. He tells how he was deluded into 
signing the articles. It is very different 
from the version in which the Pope's 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 229 

envoy whispers that one may sin freely 
and be sure of absolution. 



Came next the papal envoy from Aumone, 

With word the Pope, moved by the troublous time. 

Willed my submission to the royal will. 

This was the second fraud ; remains the third. 

My lords, the Customs named till then were few. 

In evil hour I yielded — pledged the Church, 

Alas ! to what I know not. On the instant 

The King commanded, *« Write ye down these 

laws," 
And soon, too soon, a parchment pre-ordained 
Upon our table lay, a scroll inscribed 
With usages sixteen, whereof most part 
Were shamefuller than the worse discussed till then. 
My lords, too late I read that scroll. I spurned it ; 
I swore by Him who made the heavens and earth 
That never seal of mine should touch that bond. 
Not mine, but juggle-changed. My lords, that eve 
A truthful servant and a fearless one. 
Who bears my cross, and taught me, too, to bear 

one, — 
Llewellyn is his name, remembered be it ! — 
Probed me, and probed with sharp and searching 

words ; 
And as the sun my sin before me stood. 
My lords for forty days I kept my fast. 
And held me from the offering of the mass. 
And sat in sackcloth ; till the Pope sent word, 
** Arise ; be strong and walk ! " And I arose. 
And hither came ; and here confession make 
That till the cleansed leper once again 



230 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Take voluntary back his leprosy, 

I with those Royal Customs stain no more 

My soul, which Christ hath washed. 

De Vere shows consummate skill in 
building up bit by bit the Archbishop, in 
accordance with the character given him 
by authentic writers. The Primate asked 
of his servants their honest opinions of 
this conduct, and accepted opinions thus 
frankly tendered as his guide. The flat- 
tery of Tennyson's Herbert of Bosham, so 
complacently swallowed by the laureate's 
political Primate, would have brought 
down the censure of the real St. Thomas. 

De Vere characterizes Llewellyn, the 
Celtic cross-bearer, by a nice touch : 

The tables groaned with gold ; I scorned the pageant ; 
The Norman pirates and the Saxon boors 
Sat round and fed ; I hated them alike. 
The rival races, one in sin. Alone 
We Britons tread our native soil. 

Tennyson shows us the Archbishop 
rushing to his death from obstinacy and 
want of self-control. De Brito, Fitzurse, 
and De Tracy have come to put into act 
the hasty words of the King and to murder 
the Archbishop. Becket rails at them 
bitterly, throws Fitzurse from him, and 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 231 

pitches De Tracy " headlong " after the 
manner of the muscular Christian heroes 
beloved of the late Rev. Charles Kingsley. 
He even sneers at the monks whom Ten- 
nyson makes to flee. " Our dovecote 
flown!" he says, "I cannot tell why 
monks should all be cowards.'* He still 
repeats the sneer, until Grim, whose arm 
is broken by a blow aimed at Becket, 
reminds him that he is a monk. Rosa- 
mond rushes in and begs the murderers 
to spare the Archbishop, and then he is 
slain, just as a thunderstorm breaks. 
This climax, which in De Vere's tragedy 
follows strictly the authentic account of 
the sacrilege, is made trivial by a theatri- 
cal stroke. 

There is nothing in Tennyson's 
" Becket " to compare with the lyrics in 
" The Princess," or even the lute song in 
" Queen Mary " ; but they are airy and 
expressive of the mood of the persons in 
whose mouths they are placed. Queen 
Eleanor sings : 

Over ! the sweet Summer closes. 

The reign of roses is done ; 
Over and gone with the roses. 

And over and gone with the sun. 



232 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Over ! the sweet Summer closes. 
And never a flower at the close; 

Over and gone with the roses. 

And Winter again and the snows. 

It is quite in accordance with the mood 
of the light-minded Queen, who is quite 
past the August of life. She gives the 
impression that she was half-crazedj a 
kind of Proven9al bacchante, and her first 
entrance destroys all respect for her sanity. 

De Vere's " St. Thomas of Canter- 
bury '' has a contrast in " Becket " which 
makes it glow and seem more full of lustre 
and color, as a ruby put in a circle of 
brilliants. It is hard to account for the 
blindness of the poet of the " Idyls of the 
King " in venturing to attempt theatri- 
cally what had been already so well done. 
De Vere's place as a great poet was settled 
when " Alexander the Great *' appeared. 
" St. Thomas of Canterbury " was not 
needed to teach the world what he could 
do. But he gave it out of the abundance 
of his heart ; and we may thank God that 
we have a seer at once strong, pure, true 
to his ideals both in religion and art, 
worthy to wear the mantle that fell from 
the shoulders of Wordsworth. ' 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 233 

But this fact remains : elevation of 
thought, force of poetry, fideHty to his- 
tory, cannot make an acting play ; so 
De Vere's tragedy is that anomalous 
thing, a "closet drama," and, really, 
with all its virtues, not a drama at all. 

And this other fact, too, remains, that 
Tennyson, in attempting to be theatrical, 
left a form to which all the skill of Sir 
Henry Irving could not even give the 
shadow of dramatic vitality. 



THE COMPARATIVE METHOD 
IN LITERATURE 



THE COMPARATIVE METHOD 
IN LITERATURE 

OF all critics Voltaire was the nar- 
rowest and the most incapable of 
appreciating the methods of com- 
parative literature. He was almost ready 
to say, with LeClerc, " The English have 
many good books ; it is a pity that the 
authors of that country can write only in 
their own language." And yet, narrow 
even to classical bigotry as he was, with 
regard to all literature that was not a 
French imitation of Greece and Rome, he 
admits the continuity, the relativity, the 
world-wide power of literature, when 
he says, '' There are books that are like 
the fire on our hearths: we take a spark of 
this fire from our neighbors, we light our 
own with it ; its warmth is communicated 
to others, and it belongs to all." 

The business of the student of literature 
is to trace the pedigrees of books as well 
as to compare books with books. And 



238 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

this comparison, this power of tracing, 
implies in its result both concentration 
and expansion. Every book has its pedi- 
I gree ; and the ancestors of books, like the 
ancestors of persons, cannot be uprooted 
from the soil in which they grew ; they 
are of their climate, of their time. As 
the bit of tapestry from a far-off Turkish 
palace carries the scent of the attar of 
roses to distant lands and through many 
changing years, so the book — one of a 
line of books — mingles with the current 
of thought long after it is forgotten, in the 
life of an aUen nation. Joseph Texte, in 
his " Etudes de Litterature Europeenne," 
says : 

" A literature, no more than an animal organ- 
ism, grows isolated from neighboring nations 
and literatures. The study of a living .being is 
in a great part the study of the influences which 
unite it to beings near it and of the influences 
of all species which surround us Hke an invisible 
network. There is no literature, and perhaps 
no writer, of whom it can be said that the his- 
tory confines itself within the limits of his own 
country. How can the evolution of German 
literature be understood, without knowing the 
reasons for the acceptance on the part of 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 239 

German writers of the French Influence, and 
then of its rejection for the English influence ? 
The history of the influence of Shakespeare in 
Europe would, of itself, be an essential chapter 
in the history of modern literature. Romanti- 
cism i? primarily an international event, which 
can be explained, as George Brandes says, only 
by the inter-relations of various literatures." 

The sentimental romanticism of Goethe, 
as evident in " The Sorrows of Werther," 
is due to the same influence that made 
"La Nouvelle Heloise" of Rousseau, 
and made Sterne's " The Sentimental 
Journey"; but before Rousseau we find 
that other sentimentalist, the Abbe Pre- 
vost, whose " Manon Lescaut" was the 
predecessor of " Paul and Virginia." Vol- 
taire, as everybody knows, owed much 
of his worst quality to the English Boling- 
broke. In his serious works we find 
English deism served with the esp7'it 
Gaulois ; in the others, where wit and 
bitter cynicism play like infernal lightning, 
we find Rabelais changed, and yet the 
same. To quote from Joseph Texte 
again : 

" It seems, finally, that the literature of the 
modern epoch — and perhaps of all epochs — 



240 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

neither develops nor progresses without imi- 
tating or borrowing : imitation of antique, as in 
France in the seventeenth century; borrowing 
from neighboring literatures, as in Germany in 
the eighteenth. It is necessary, in order to make 
original works germinate, to prepare the soil 
with the debris of other works.'* 

The student of literature, then, ought 
not to attempt to take one book and 
isolate it from its fellows. The beauty 
and freshness and humor of Chaucer may 
be enjoyed whether we go back to the 
trouveres for the sources of his earlier 
works, or trace the effects of Dante and 
Petrarch on those later m life ; but for the 
broadening of the mind, for the percep- 
tion of that sense of continuity so neces- 
sary for the knowledge of God's guidance 
in history, for the value of literature as a 
method of discovering the meaning of 
laws, it is well that Chaucer should be 
studied as a link in a chain. And yet not 
only as a link in a chain, but as a link in 
a chain running, as it were, through a 
closely knit coat of mail, touching and 
binding a hundred other links, large and 
small, without which the gHttering gar- 
ment of knighthood would be incomplete. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 241 

It deepens pleasure to know the rela- 
tions of books to one another. It makes 
the study of literature easier, for it softens 
that feeling of desperation which strikes 
the reader when he enters a teeming 
library. Where shall he begin ? How 
shall he hew a line through this wilderness 
of books ? The genealogy of the book 
he loves will help him to do this, and its 
posterity will further assist in the work. 
Further, to put the study of the pedigrees 
of books on higher ground, who speaks 
the word "comparison," with the object 
of discovering truths, speaks the word 
" science.'* As Joseph Texte remarks ; 

" If the history of literature does not consti- 
tute an end in itself; if it aims, like all re- 
searches worthy of the name of science, at 
certain results which are at present beyond it ; ' 
if it assumes, in fine, to be a form of the 
psychology of races and men, the comparative 
method imposes upon it the necessity of regard- 
ing the study of one type of men, or of one 
literature, as only an approach to a study more 
worthy to be called scientific." 

There are many reasons, then, why 

books should be studied comparatively. 
16 



242 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

The mere investigation as to whether one 
book is an imitation of another is not so 
important or vital as the analysis of beau- 
ties that have stimulated greater beauties 
in another book. No reader will say that 
Plutarch and Shakespeare resemble each 
other. The Greek was a prose narrator, 
greatest in his way ; the Englishman was 
a dramatic poet, greatest in his way ; and 
yet the influence of Plutarch on "Julius 
Caesar*' and " Coriolanus " Is unmis- 
takable. It Is as plain as the influence 
of the Byzantines on Giotto, or that of 
Wagner on the later manner of Verdi, or 
of Pindar on the English ode of the 
eighteenth century. Mangan and Poe 
seem to have no close relationship. As a 
rule, we do not think of them together, 
and yet it is difficult, after reading these 
poets, who evidently held peculiar and 
sensuous theories about poetry, to believe 
that Poe did not consciously imitate 
Mangan. And the German influences 
on Mangan are easily traced. How 
much Gaelic metres affected him, it is not, 
unfortunately, possible for me to say. 

To return to Shakespeare : I once 
asked a friend of mine who loved only a 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 243 

few books, why he kept the maxims of 
Epictetus, the Roman slave, so near the 
plays of Shakespeare, who was more than 
any Roman patrician. He simply turned 
to a line out of Hamlet : " For there is 
nothing either good or bad, but thinking 
makes it so." " That is from Epictetus," 
he said, " and the more I study Shake- 
speare's philosophy, the more I find Epic- 
tetus." So the little volume held its 
place beside the many books of Shake- 
speare's plays, and further examination 
convinced me that it had reason to be 
there. 

Emerson, to come from the reigns of 
Nero and Elizabeth to our own time, 
owes much to Epictetus, but more to 
Plato and Montaigne. He was not an 
imitator but an assimilator ; to his philos- 
ophy we owe little, but to his power of 
stimulating idealism, much. Emerson 
reflects Plato and Montaigne and his 
New England skies at the same time. 
His Plato is not the Plato of the groves 
and the white temples, but Plato touched 
by the utilitarianism of the cotton factory ; 
his Montaigne is not the gay and po- 
lite and witty and pensive Montaigne, 



244 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

content with his books and his Burgundy, 
but a restless Montaigne, frost-bitten by 
Puritanism, become oracular because his 
auditors were too busy to contradict him. 

If you compare the four essays on 
" Friendship," — Cicero's, Montaigne's, 
Bacon's, Emerson's, — you will find the 
man Emerson surrounded and affected 
by the shades of his literary ancestors. 
If you examine his bumps, after the man- 
ner of the discredited practices of phre- 
nology, you will find that they are all of 
the American type ; but you will find, 
too, that the influence of his literary an- 
cestors has, in its old-worldly way, cor- 
rected the indications which the bumps 
show. He is composite ; and the study 
of the types that enter into his make-up 
will give a clue to the methods that ought 
to be used in the comparative study of 
other authors, who are all composite. 

Voltaire says that nearly everything in 
literature is the result of imitation. But 
Voltaire was as deficient in desire and the 
power of real comparison as any of the 
Romans or Greeks. He was the slave 
of conventions ; and was almost as rigid 
as that literary sans culotte who, in 1794, 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 245 

refused to save a victim from the guil- 
lotine because his petition had not been 
put into academic language! If Voltaire 
had said that everything great in litera- 
ture was largely the result of assimilation, 
he would have been much nearer the truth. 
There are those who call Tennyson clas- 
sical, in the sense of coldness and sym- 
metry ; yet it can be easily shown that one 
of his most influential literary ancestors 
was Byron, who can be called neither cold 
nor classical. In fact, if any poet is ro- 
mantic, and sentimentally romantic, Byron 
is that poet. In " Locksley Hall " and 
" Maud,'* there is the Byronic note, with- 
out the depths of Byronic despair. In 
the first part of " Locksley Hall " Ten- 
nyson's hopes and ideals are infinitely 
higher than Byron's, and the passion is 
infinitely purer in " Maud." In the sec- 
ond part of " Locksley Hall " the impet- 
uous boy, who feels that the world had 
come to an end when Byron died, has dis- 
appeared in the old man, whose hopes in 
the " Christ to come " through science 
and the new social order have completely 
gone out. Tennyson's poetry has a long 
pedigree ; and there are many quarterings 



246 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

on its coat of arms : among the heraldic 
colors is the vert of Wordsworth as well 
as the flaring vermilion of Byron ; but 
there is one especially that cannot be ex- 
pressed by any feudal tinct, and another 
that may be symbolized by many. The 
first is Theocritus ; the second. Sir Thomas 
Malory. 

From the first, Tennyson borrowed the 
title of the greatest of modern epics, " The 
Idyls of the King." And the influence of 
Theocritus, the sweetest of all pastoral 
singers, is found everywhere, but most of 
all in " GEnone." Theocritus, who was 
an ancestor of Vergil and of all later pas- 
toral poets, takes new life in Tennyson. 
Even the English verse translations of 
this singer of the reed and the cypress 
and of the contest of the shepherds in the 
green pastures cannot wholly shut his 
beauty from our view. It is as hard to 
endure his artificial image as set up by 
Pope as it is to endure that of Chaucer 
as regilded by Dryden. Even Mrs. 
Browning handles his exquisite idyls with 
a touch that does not fit the violet of the 
Spring. In prose translations some of the 
aroma escapes, but enough of it remains 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 247 

to cheer the soul with loveliness. To 
read him in youth is never to forget him. 
For Theocritus was the poet of nature, 
the inventor of the little idyl-pictures of 
town or country, — that singer of idyls 
who, nearly three hundred years before 
Christ, saw dimly Nature's God. He 
says in the seventh eidulla : 

" And from above, down upon our heads were 
waving to and fro many poplars and elms ; and 
the sacred stream hard by kept murmuring, as it 
flowed down from the cave of the nymphs. And 
the fire-colored cicalas, on the shady branches, 
were toiling at chirping ; while, from afar off, 
in the thick thorn-bushes the thrush was war- 
bling. Tufted larks and goldfinches sang, the 
tuitle-dove cooed; tawny bees were humming 
round the fountains ; all things were breathing 
the incense of very plenteous Summer and of 
fruit-time. Pears fell at our feet, and apples 
were rolling for us in abundance, and the boughs 
hung in profusion, weighed down to the ground 
with plums." 

The warmth of the Summer is in 
Theocritus. The gold and purple bees 
float in the dry down of the thistle, and 
Demeter's symbols, the spikes of corn 
and poppies, glow golden and scarlet in 



248 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

the soft Sicilian air. Tennyson, too, 
gives the color of the Summer and the 
incense of the Autumn in symbols sug- 
gested by the Syracusan. And from 
the refrains of Theocritus he borrows, 
as Poe borrows from Mangan, the ca- 
dence of his music. 

Edmund Clarence Stedman, in " The 
Victorian Poets," has some pregnant 
chapters on the resemblance of Theocri- 
tus and Tennyson, and his passages show- 
ing how Theocritus vitalized the English 
poet as a bee vitalizes a flower are culled 
with exquisite insight and taste. Among 
these Mr. Stedman quotes the delicious 
appeal of Cyclops to Galatea (in the 
Eleventh Idyl), to compare it with the 
passage in Book VII of "The Princess" : 

Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height : 
What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang). 
In height and cold, the splendor of the hills ? 

There is the echo of the Sicilian Sum- 
mer in " The Gardener's Daughter " : 

All the land in flowery squares. 
Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind. 
Smelt of the coming Summer. . . . 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 249 

From the woods 
Came voices of the well-contented doves. 
The lark could scarce get out his notes for joy. 
But shook his song together as he near'd 
His happy home, the ground. To left and right. 
The cuckoo told his name to all the hills ; 
The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm ; 
The redcap whistled ; and the nightingale 
Sang loud, a though he were a bird of day. 

" CEnone," with the pathetic refrain 
suggested by both Theocritus and Mos- 
chus, could not have existed in its pres- 
ent form, had not the Syracusan sung 
amid the hyacinth and arbutus. 

In the black-letter of Sir Thomas 
Malory, Tennyson read many times, 
until his mind and heart were steeped 
in the wonder of the old stories ; and 
from the Elizabethan poets, who had 
learned much from their Italian brethren, 
he borrowed the allegory and added it to 
the tales of Sir Thomas. Spenser him- 
self, following Ariosto, — for Ariosto is 
the chief literary ancestor of Spenser, — 
had made an allegory. Tennyson strung 
the many-colored gems of Sir Thomas 
on the silver string of his veiled mean- 
ing. Or rather, as he told his tales, the 
beads of his allegory slipped through his 



250 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

fingers. But the stones of the knights 
were greatly changed by the modern 
poet. Arthur is not, in "The Idyls of 
the King," the terrible monarch of fire 
and blood of Sir Thomas Malory. An- 
other age and other manners have soft- 
ened the chivalric compromises of the 
earUer times, for chivalry seems to have 
been a series of compromises with an 
ideal in the distance. The Arthur of Sir 
Thomas Malory is not the saintly King 
of Tennyson's imagination. In Malory's 
" Morte Arthure," he does and says 
things very inconsistent with the ideal 
blameless King we love and revere in the 
" Idyls." And the allegory which Tenny- 
son wove cannot be read into the rough 
doings of Arthur's knights. Nor did Sir 
Thomas, or the sympathetic Caxton who 
printed his book, see things as Spenser 
and Milton and Tennyson saw them, — all 
these seeing differently according to the 
light of their time. But, if a book may be 
judged by its effects, the " Morte Arthure " 
does not deserve the condemnation of 
those Elizabethan Reformers, like Roger 
Ascham, who could excuse murder and 
adultery in an unrepentant real king, but 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 251 

held up hands of horror at a mythical one, 
even when he repented. Says the grand 
old printer, Caxton, in his preface to the 
" Morte Arthure " : 

" Herein may be seen noble chivalry, cour- 
tesy, humanity, friendlessness, hardiness, love, 
friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, sin. 
All is written for our doctrine, for to beware 
that we fall not into vice or sin, but to exercise 
and follow virtue, by which we may come and 
attain to good fame and renommee in this life, 
and after this to come unto everlasting bliss in 
Heaven ; the which He grants us that reigneth 
in heaven, the Blessed Trinity. Amen. 

" ' Ah, my Lord Arthur,' cries Sir Bedevere, 
on the last day of the fight, ' what shall be- 
come of me now ye go from me and leave 
me here alone among my enemies ? ' ' Com- 
fort thyself,' said the King, ' and do as well 
as thou mayest, for in me is no trust for to 
trust in. For I will unto the vale of Avilion 
to heal me of my grievous wound. And if thou 
hear never more of me, pray for my soul ! ' " 

We can all recall the Homeric echo 
of this in Tennyson's — 

The old order changeth, yielding place to new. 

And God fulfils himself in many ways. 

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 



252 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Comfort thyself ; what comfort is in me ? 

I have lived my life, and that which I have done 

May He within himself make pure ! but thou 

If thou shouldst never see my face again. 

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer 

Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice 

Rise like a fountain for me night and day. 

For what are men better than sheep or goats 

That nourish a blind life within the brain, 

If, knowing God, they Hft not hands of prayer 

Both for themselves and those who call them friend ? 

For so the whole round earth is every way 

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. 

" Now," says old Sir Thomas, when 
the roses have faded, " now we leave 
Guinever in Almsbury a nun in white 
and black, and there she was abbess and 
ruler, as reason would." How Tenny- 
son refines upon this in the light of 
more cultured genius and finer days ! 
You remember the simple little novice 
who sits at the sad Queen's feet, and 
sings : 

Too late, too late, ye cannot enter now ! 

Tennyson writes of the nuns and 
Guinevere : 

They took her to themselves ; and she 
Still hoping, fearing, " Is it yet too late ? '* 
Dwelt with them, till in time their abbess died. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 253 

Then she, for her good deeds and her pure life. 
And for the power of ministration in her. 
And likewise for the high rank she had borne. 
Was chosen abbess, there, an abbess, lived 
For three brief years, and there, an abbess pass'd 
To where beyond these voices there is peace. 

It is the province of genius, as Emer- 
son says, to borrow nobly. If the im- 
mediate ancestor of " The Idyls of the 
King " was the " Morte Arthure " as 
to matter, the remote ancestor was the 
" Idyls " of Theocritus as to form and 
manner. But I think it needs only time 
to show how many other prose writers 
and poets, how many changes of phi- 
losophies, customs, and points of view, it 
takes to make any writer who speaks to 
the soul with wisdom and to the heart 
with beauty. A poet descends from 
heaven, step by step, like Jacob's an- 
gels on bars of celestial light. God 
only can create him, and the Ancient of 
Days makes every hour from the begin- 
ning move toward his coming, — and 
each poet is the father of another poet. 

Tennyson was the child of Sir 
Thomas Malory and of his own time, 
as Dante was of Vergil and of his 



254 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

time ; as Milton was of the Old Testa- 
ment as interpreted by the rebels of his 
time ; as William Morris was of Chaucer, 
accentuated by the tense romanticism of 
Dante Rossetti and the early Proven9al 
poets. 

Theocritus, Sir Thomas Malory, Ten- 
nyson ! How near, and yet how far 
apart ! And comparatively, how many 
allied shades they recall ! You mention 
" The Holy Grail," and up rise Spenser, 
Milton, Lowell, — the Lowell of Sir Laun- 
fal, — and then Wagner's " Parsifal," and 
spirit of beauty after spirit of beauty, until 
the earliest of them seems to touch the 
very seraphim. We can as easily leave 
out St. Thomas and St. Francis of As- 
sisi in considering the genesis of Dante 
as we can consider any modern great 
work of literature without reference to 
its pedigree. Music, too, is closely 
bound to literature, — the myth of Lo- 
hengrin is only a later version of that of 
Cupid and Psyche. Wagner could not 
have done what he did without the 
Niebelungenlied ; nor Gounod, if the 
Middle Age legend of Faust had not 
been told from mouth to mouth, until 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 255 

Goethe, borrowing nobly from the Book 
of Job, made Faust vital and grandiose 
for all time. If culture means the 
broadening of the mind through the 
widest knowledge of the best, it is hard 
to see with what reason we can neglect 
the study of the pedigrees of books. 

If Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth, 
Tennyson also succeeded Byron. While 
Wordsworth was serene, a painter of 
nature, Byron was the opposite of him. 
He was fiery, volcanic, furious, lurid, 
great in genius. He v/as popular, while 
Wordsworth, whom the world is now 
only beginning to acknowledge, was ne- 
glected ; so that, strange as it may seem 
at first, Tennyson's immediate predecessor 
was Lord Byron. Byron's popularity 
was great while he lived. The hero of 
" Locksley Hall " — I mean the first 
part of it, for I think the second part is 
decidedly the better — is a Byronic hero 
diluted. And the hero of " Maud " is 
of a similar type. 

In " Locksley Hall " the hero sighs 
and moans and calls Heaven's vengeance 
down on his ancestral roof because a girl 
has refused to marry him ; because his 



256 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

cousin Amy marries another man, he goes 
into a paroxysm of poetry and denuncia- 
tion and prophecy. But, as Shakespeare 
says, " Men have died from time to time 
and worms have eaten them, but not for 
love." And the hero of " Locksley 
Hall " lives to write in a calmer style a 
good many years later. " Maud," like 
" Locksley Hall," showed something of 
the influence of Byron. After " Locksley 
Hall" and " Maud," the effect of Byron 
on Tennyson seems to grow less. 

The young Tennyson^s favorite poet 
was Thomson, he of the serene and gen- 
tle " Seasons." Mrs. Ritchie tells us 
how very early the influence of Thomson 
showed itself: 

" Alfred's first verses, so I have heard him 
say, were written upon a slate which his brother 
Charles put into his hand one Sunday at Loutli, 
when all the elders of the party were going into 
church and the child was left alone. Charles 
gave him a subject, — the flowers in the garden, 
— and when he came back from church little 
Alfred brought the slate to his brother, all cov- 
ered with written lines of blank verse. They 
were made on the model of Thomson's 
" Seasons," the only poetry he had ever read. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 257 

One can picture it all to oneself, the flowers in 
the garden, the verses, the little poet with 
waiting eyes, and the young brother scanning 
the lines. ' Yes, you can write,' said Charles, 
and he gave Alfred back the slate." 

The poet of Alfred's first love was the 
calm and pleasant Thomson, we see. 
Later, as he grew toward manhood, he 
read Byron. He scribbled in the Byronic 
strain. How strong a hold Byron's fiery 
verse had taken on the boy's mind is 
shown by his own confession. When 
Alfred was about fifteen, the news came 
that Byron was dead. " I thought the 
whole world was at an end," he said. " I 
thought everything was over and finished 
for everyone — that nothing else mattered. 
I remember I walked out alone, and carved 
' Byron is dead ' into the sandstone." 
Although " Locksley Hall" and "Maud" 
show Byronic reflections, yet they were 
not the earliest published of Tennyson's 
poems. 

The Greek poet, Moschus, wrote an 
elegy on his friend Bion, and the refrain 
of this elegy, " Begin, Sicilian muses, begin 
the lament," is famous. Tennyson, this 
modern poet, possessed of the Greek 
17 



258 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

passion for symmetry, and influenced 
almost as much by Theocritus, Moschus, 
and Bion as by the spirit of his own time, 
has made an elegy on his friend as solemn, 
as stately, as perfect in its form as that of 
Moschus, but not so spontaneous and 
tender. There is more pathos in King 
David's few words over the body of 
Absalom than in all the noble falls and 
swells of " In Memoriam." 

I doubt whether any heart In affliction 
has received genuine consolation from 
this decorous and superbly measured flow 
of grief. It is not a poen> of faith, nor is 
it a poem of doubt ; but faith and doubt 
tread upon each other's footsteps. In- 
stead of the divine certitude of Dante, we 
have a doubting half-belief Tennyson 
loves the village church, the holly- 
wreathed baptismal font, the peaceful vic- 
arage, because they represent serenity and 
order. He detests revolution. If he had 
lived before the coming of Christ, in the 
vales of Sicily, he would probably have 
hated to see the rural sports of the pagans 
disturbed by the disciples of a less pictur- 
esque and less natural religion. 

Keats could not have been Keats as we 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 259 

know him, without Spenser. He is called 
Greek, but he knew Greek best through 
Chapman's Homer. Yet he caught the 
spirit, and the form for him did not mat- 
ter, — he had that from the " Epithala- 
mium " of Spenser; and "no poet," as 
M. Texte admits, " has excited more 
vocations to poetry than Spenser." He 
is, Hke Shelley, the poet for the poet. 
Other poets may speak to the world ; he 
sings to the sacred city. He lacks the 
elevation of Spenser, deflected as it was 
by the Elizabethan concession to the 
political spirit of his time ; he is without 
the unconsciousness of the Greeks, whose 
spirit he assumed without understanding 
it. He longed for sensations rather than 
thoughts, for dreams rather than activities. 
He was romantic, if romance implies 
aspiration. The " Ode to the Nightin- 
gale " expresses Keats. He was half in 
love with " easeful death." He was not 
Greek in this ; his neohellenism is like 
the paganism of Swinburne, — it cannot 
rid itself of the shadow of the Cross ; it is 
black against the light of the Resurrec- 
tion. Like Maurice de Guerin, he loved 
the pleasures of sensation, and the fact 



26o THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

that they must pass filled him with fear. 
He turns to the immortal figures on the 
Grecian urn with wild regret ; — all in life 
that has life, dies ; only the work of the 
artist, who uses inorganic stuff for his 
material, lives! He felt, indeed, that his 
name was writ in water before Shelley 
made that splendid epitaph. 

" Endymion " is a poem of shadows 
in the moonlight. It is not Greek, but 
it is touched by the spirit of Greece. It 
is romantic because it bears everywhere 
the burden of the poet's longing. " A 
joy forever" he longs for; but all joys 
pass as the moon passes, and the shades 
of beauty with it. Keats is a neo-Grecian, 
if you will ; his literary ancestors are the 
gods of the rivers and the woods, as 
Greek singers made them ; but he is 
nearer to Ovid than to Theocritus, nearer 
to Vergil than to Bion, and nearest of 
all to this time, which, under the influence 
of Sir Walter Scott and Byron, was the 
time of longing for light and color and 
glow and beauty that should be eternal. 
He, in his turn, had influenced many. 
When we speak of the Preraphaelites, 
we imply the name of Keats. " The 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 261 

Earthly Paradise " of William Morris 
presumes the influence of Chaucer; but 
who can read from ''The Earthly Para- 
dise " without thinking of Keats ? 

Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing, 
I cannot ease the burden of your fears. 
Or make quick-coming death a little thing. 
Or bring again the pleasure of past years. 
Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears. 
Or hope again for aught that I can say. 
The idle singer of an empty day. 

What we call the Puritanism of Spenser 
was, on its spiritual side, the eclipsed light 
of the Catholic years that had passed ; it 
sustained him, for he was the son of Ari- 
osto and of truth and beauty. And the 
Puritanism of Milton, — of the mind, 
not of the heart, — while it vitiated his 
Christianity, did not subdue his Hebraic 
elevation. Keats, the poet of earthly 
beauty, had the feeling of the Greek for 
the sensations of life, but he was op- 
pressed by the fear that a day would come 
when he and life must part. Heine, a 
great lyrist, too (he was Greek by turns, 
less sublimated than Keats), stood old, 
almost blind, paralyzed, at the foot of the 
statue of Venus of Melos, in the Louvre. 



262 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

And the world seemed about to go to 
pieces, for the Revolution of 1848 roared 
around him. The true Greek would 
have died, satisfied that he had lived his 
life. But Heine, who had lived for 
earthly beauty and joy, who was already 
dead because the pleasures of life were 
dead to him, cried aloud in despair. 
Earth could not give immortality ! Of 
these neo-Greeks — not of the old 
Greeks, but touched by their spirit — 
was Keats. 

The elegy of Theocritus for Daphnis 
has echoed ever since he called on the 
Sicilian muses to weep with him. If it, 
with the recurrent refrain of musical 
sorrow, touched Tennyson in our time 
to sing of the dead Hallam, it spurred 
Milton to raise the voice of music over 
Lycidas, and Shelley to consecrate the 
immortal " Adonais " to Keats. The ped- 
igree of the English elegy is as easily 
traced as that of the English ode, with 
whose richness our literature actually 
blazes. The Pindaric ode is a name of 
horror in English, since a slavish imitation 
of the sublime Greek distorted some of 
the finest odes of Gray and Collins. The 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 263 

spirit of Pindar helped to make the Eng- 
lish ode the most beautiful in all the 
world, but the attempt to give Greek 
form to our verse has almost ruined, by- 
meaningless strophes and antistrophes, 
some of the loveliest of English odes. I 
need only indicate the pedigree of the 
ode at the highest by mentioning three 
sublime names, — St. Teresa, Crashaw, 
Coventry Patmore. 

The raptures of St. Teresa inspired 
Crashaw with the ode beginning- 
Love, thou art absolute sole lord 
Of life and death, 

and with that other ode, less dignified 
because its form is an English imitation 
of the exquisite ever-changing music of 
Pindar, which can be transmitted into our 
tongue only by interpretation. Pindar 
influences the form, and St. Teresa the 
spirit ; but Patmore is touched by Crashaw 
and not at all by the form of Pindar, 
though he is nearer to Pindar than any 
other of the poets, who failed to see that 
each of his odes had a delicate shell-like 
music of its own which could not be ex- 
pressed by a short jumping line thrown 



264 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

in here and there among the longer ones. 
William Sharp says : 

" Each of the odes of Pindar has its own 
music, as each conch stranded by the waves has 
its own forlorn vibration of the sea's rhythm ; 
whereas the so-called Pindaric odes of Cowley 
and his imitators have no more individuality of 
music than have the exercises of instrumental- 
ists in contradistinction to the compositions of 



The pedigree of the Pindaric ode in 
English offers an admirable subject for the 
study of a beautiful form twisted into an 
incongruous shape by poets who blindly 
followed one another. 

There can be no question that a com- 
parative study of the literature of the 
Japanese and the Italian, the Basque and 
the Teuton, would make for cosmopoli- 
tanism, but who can speak of fixed literary 
laws which shall bear exact scientific analy- 
sis, without stretching the word "literary" 
so thin that it must break? Philosophy 
may be cosmopolitan or international — 
Christianity is universal ; and if the whole 
world were Christendom, animated and 
active, there would be only one spirit 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 265 

in literature ; but literature of itself must, 
until the world shall all be one way of 
thinking and feeling, be as varied as Mil- 
ton's leaves in Vallombrosa ; for no two 
leaves are exactly alike, though they are 
all leaves. 

Still, the value and beauty of literature 
are best studied by processes of compari- 
son which may be called scientific, and 
these processes of comparison are ren- 
dered easier by the consideration of the 
pedigrees of books. 



DEFINITION OF 
LITERATURE 



A DEFINITION OF 
LITERATURE 

IT is very hard to find even a working 
definition of literature. Literature is 
so closely the expression of life and 
the changing conditions of life that we 
can hardly limit it except by life itself. 
And a working definition must have limi- 
tations, though it may not entirely cover 
the thing intended to be defined. To the 
Greeks of Athens and the Romans of the 
city of Augustus, it meant the imitation 
of elegant models ; to us it means the ex- 
pression of the phenomena of life in the 
form of written words. 

We can understand the meaning of lit- 
erature only by studying the efl^ects of 
ethical, social, political movements upon 
life ; and this is best done through the 
literatures of peoples, subject to their 
changes. The body of Hebrew literature, 
through which God himself has spoken, 
is the history of the Jewish people. If it 



270 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

were merely the clear dry annals of the 
Jewish people, it would be history, not 
literature. But when we find the minds 
of David and Job revealed in words, we 
have essential history, but something 
more than a mere annal, which is not 
literature. 

Literature, as far as it can be described 
to-day, is more than the reflection of life ; 
and it is much more than it seemed to be 
to the Athenian Greeks, the Augustan 
Romans, the French of the time of Riche- 
lieu, or the Italians of the Renaissance ; 
for, in their eyes, it was a narrow thing, 
capable of rigid definition. It was not 
what they imagined it to be, and they — 
as the " Poetics '* of Aristotle and its imi- 
tations show us — did not really succeed in 
defining it. It was always elusive, in spite 
of their fine rhetorical terms. They pur- 
sued it, as Apollo pursued Daphne, only to 
find, when they came near, that the nymph 
had turned into a bay tree. To them 
literature was a Galatea, who by all the 
rules should have been marble, but who 
under the very eyes of the critic amazed 
him by assuming the life and incompre- 
hensible fantasies of the universal woman. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 271 

Literature in general, when we attempt 
to define it, becomes as elusive as the 
highest of its forms, which is poetry. 
Literature reflects life in all its phases, to 
use a trite comparison, as some of the old 
Gothic cathedrals reflect life — from the 
agonizing figure on the rood screen to 
the grinning gargoyles on the roof and 
the vile little demons — the seven deadly 
sins — carved on the backs of the remote 
stalls. It has its spires that spring up as 
high as the clouds, and its crawling things 
of the earth, symbolical of the vices of the 
people that produce it. Its form changes, 
not only with every great impulse of force, 
but with every slight change of emotion. 
It expresses, it illuminates, it interprets ; 
it cannot exist without thought, but it is 
more than thought. It is not philosophy, 
but it is impregnated with the effects of 
philosophy. It is not logic, or metaphys- 
ics, or ethics ; but it cannot exist in per- 
fection without a logical basis — and it 
partakes of metaphysics and ethics. It 
is neither scientia in the old sense — for 
pure and colorless truth cannot be litera- 
ture — nor science in the new ; yet it exists 
through truth, and its phenomena are best 



272 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

explained by the methods of science. It 
is not history, yet it is the beginning of his- 
tory. It is not the personal word alone, 
yet the personal word is necessary to its 
existence. As I said, it is not ethics, yet 
it expresses the morality of the nation 
whose life it interprets. It is minutely 
personal — personality is one of its es- 
sences, and yet it represents better than 
anything else the national life. 

It has made war and restored peace ; it 
has raised men to the shining feet of God 
and led them to hell " to the lascivious 
pulsings of the lute." Dryden, in " Alex- 
ander's Feast," manifests the power of 
music, but it was not music alone that 
appealed to the great Alexander ; it was 
literature allied to music, — the soul of 
the body. 

The definitions of literature are as nu- 
merous and as inadequate as those offered 
for poetry ; and they have given rise to as 
many misunderstandings. These misun- 
derstandings have induced certain modern 
scientists to scorn literature as lawless, and 
yet to assume the language of literature 
to express their jibes, — not always to as- 
sume it with grace, but, at any rate, to use 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 273 

It, in order to be heard by all. These 
jeering scientists have this, at least, in 
common with the God they doubt, — that 
they, unconsciously imitating Him, took 
the form of literature when they spoke to 
man. And the more literary they are, 
the more the world heeds them. These 
misunderstandings once led that most 
methodical and scientific man of letters, 
Ferdinand Brunetiere, to assert that sci- 
ence is bankrupt ; it has enormous assets, 
— assets so great that it need not apply 
to the theologians for the certification of 
its cheques. Its bad reputation is due 
entirely to the fact that certain of its 
stockholders have forced drafts on that 
great theological establishment which it 
can neither dominate nor destroy. 

Literature is not, as Mr. Louis Steven- 
son once defined it, a mere jille de joie, to 
be enjoyed and cast aside, — a ballade for 
the ears of the banqueting prince, a pre- 
cious rondeau for the languid lady in the 
balcony ; literature is not, as Cardinal 
Newman implies, only the personal use 
of language; it is not, as Mr. Matthew 
Arnold would have us believe, the ethics 
of the philosophy of life; it is not, as 

£8 



274 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Mr. Swinburne insists, at its culmination 
only imagination and iiarmony. 

In his "Comparative Literature" Pro- 
fessor Posnett says that works of literature, 
whether in verse or prose, 

" are the handicraft of imagination rather than 
reflection, aim at the pleasure of the greatest 
number of the nation rather than instruction 
and practical effects, and appeal to general 
rather than specialized knowledge. . . . Every 
element of this dejfinition clearly depends on 
the limited spheres of social and mental evo- 
lution — the separation of imagination from 
experience, of didactic purpose from aesthetic 
pleasure, and that specialization of knowledge 
which is so largely due to the economic develop- 
ment known as ' division of labor.' " 

We shall, I am sure, all consent to the 
assertion that the value of literature must 
be sought for in inherent personal qualities, 
and its source must be looked for in 
human nature rather than in artful rules 
gathered from the examination of classic 
books. We are sure, too, that the max- 
ims of Aristotle — those, I mean, which 
are not founded on human nature's love 
of contrast, hatred of monotony, and the 
4esire to be taken ovit of the bounds of 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 275 

self — fail to indicate the scientific bases 
of literature because they force the ma- 
terial to suit the shape of the mould they 
impose. We have gone beyond the blind 
acceptance of the old standards to which 
the epic, the tragedy, and the lyric were 
forced to adjust themselves. It is as im- 
possible to use them to-day as it is impos- 
sible to turn our uninflected English into 
genuine hexameters. On close compari- 
son with the thing defined. Professor Pos- 
nett's definition proves as unsatisfactory 
as hitherto all definitions have proved. 

Let us consider those manifestations of 
the life of the soul on which he founds 
this definition. However we may differ 
in opinion as to the relative value of other^ 
works of high literary art« there is only 
one opinion about Dante's " Inferno." 
You may argue about the " Purgatorio " 
or the " Paradiso," if you will. You 
may insist, too, that Milton's " Paradise 
Regained " is a failure ; but you must 
admit the eminence of " Paradise Lost." 
No cultivated man will deny the masterly 
qualities of the first part of " Faust," 
though he may be reserved in his admira- 
tion of the second. It is agreed that the 



276 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

" Inferno," " Paradise Lost," and the first 
part of " Faust " are noble works of litera- 
ture. And it is plain that the object or 
the effect of these three masterpieces is 
not to give pleasure, — that higher pleasure 
of which even the Utilitarians admit the 
existence. The object of Dante was 
beyond and above the giving of pleasure. 
When Milton pondered and wrought 
until " dim suffusion " veiled his orbs, it 
was not to give pleasure to the greatest 
number. And who really believes that 
Keats, rapt in the vision of Diana and 
Endymion, spoke with the Utilitarian 
purpose ? And who, knowing how Mau- 
rice de Guerin wrote " Le Centaure " for 
God, silence, and himself, can fail to see 
that some of the greatest things of litera- 
ture owe their existence to the desire to 
express and yet not to communicate ? 

There are great poems, like Browning's 
"Sordello" and "The Ring and the 
Book," that are beyond the liking or un- 
derstanding of the greatest number. If 
we leave out the author's intention and con- 
sider only the matter of effect, we find, in 
the so-called sonnets of Shakespeare, great 
literature so personal and yet so appealing 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 277 

that the interpreters far exceed in number 
those to whom its beauty clearly speaks. 
That flower of lyrical literature, the " Epi- 
thalamium " of Spenser, touches only the 
few. Admitting that the "Inferno'* is 
literature, and leaving out the question 
as to whether it appeals to many or not, 
we cannot help seeing that Professor 
Posnett's definition does not touch it. 
I accentuate his definition because it is 
largely accepted, and because Professor 
Posnett assumes that it is scientific. It is 
evident that in the " Inferno " Dante aimed 
at " instruction and practical eff^ects " ; it 
is evident that he attained his object by 
illuminating his processes with imagina- 
tion and harmony ; and yet, if we accept 
this very modern definition, Dante and 
Milton must be exiled, as Plato would 
have exiled all the poets, — but for a 
different reason. 

When Orlando carved the name of 
Rosalind on the bark of the oaks in the 
Forest of Arden, he felt the impulse of 
many poets, yet he made the name only 
for silence and himself. Literature can- 
not be judged as literature by the Utilita- 
rian criterion. To make it a matter for 



278 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

the suffrage of the greatest number is to 
take it into the ground now occupied 
by politics. A literary man crowned by 
the universal suffrage of the American 
people — if the elect did not mercifully 
intimidate voters — would be, for all time, 
a pleasing example of mediocrity ! 

With the beginning of the new century 
the worship of Goethe has taken new 
vigor. On all sides ascend thick incense 
clouds to the manes of the many-sided. 
But why is Goethe acclaimed? Because 
of the aesthetic pleasure his lyrics give P 
Because of the purely romantic qualities 
of " Goetz " or the imaginative glow of 
"Faust"? Not at all, — though these 
qualities, too, are acclaimed, — but be- 
cause in his works are said to be found 
the germs of modern scientific develop- 
ment. He is not regarded as less than 
a poet for this or less of a man of letters, 
but as more of a poet and more of a 
maker of literature. A great part of his 
claim on the modern mind rests, then, on 
the very qualities which Professor Posnett 
eliminates from literature. But Dante, 
the poet philosopher who expressed Aris- 
totle and St. Thomas and all the science 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 279 

of his day, who founded the study of 
comparative philology, would not be 
lowered in the scale of literature if all 
his erudition were plucked from him. 
Erudition or science or experience is un- 
poetical only when the poet is too small 
for the weight he attempts to carry. But 
Dante was able to give harmony and 
the imaginative nimbus and symmetry 
and color to both abstractions and facts. 
There are poems great in themselves, 
which are all compact of harmony and im- 
agination, — for example, Shelley's " Ode 
to the Skylark," Keats's " Grecian Urn," 
Lanier's " Centennial Ode," Patmore's 
" Ode to the Body." These may be 
covered by this definition ; and still the 
mystical bases of the last of them, 
founded on philosophy and theology, 
come perilously near to ruling it out. 

Permit me to repeat Professor Posnett's 
definition. It is found on page eighteen 
of his " Comparative Literature." ^ Lit- 
erature consists "of works which, whether 

1 "Comparative Literature," by H, Macaulay Pos- 
nett. D. Appleton & Co. , New York, 1896. "The 
Science of Comparative Literature," by H. Macaulay 
Posnett, The Contemporary Re'vienvj 1901. 



28o THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

in verse or prose, are the handicraft of 
imagination rather than reflection, aim at 
the pleasure of the greatest possible num- 
ber of the nation rather than instruction 
and practical effects, and appeal to general 
rather than to specialized knowledge." 

If we deny the value of this definition, 
how can literature be defined ? I am not 
sure that the big word literature can be 
defined at all — I am not certain that the 
great and ever-changing subject it stands 
for will ever be rigidly described. But 
it seems to me that to-day literature is 
the expression in writing of thought, ex- 
perience, observation, emotion, mood, 
knowledge personally expressed. New- 
man comes very near to this in his 
definition of style. Scientia, pure and 
simple, is not literature. There is no 
personal expression in the Apostles' Creed, 
though the personal pronoun is used 
for the will that accepts scientia. The 
Apostles' Creed is not literature ; it be- 
longs wholly to no one person ; it is uni- 
versal. The epical Isaiah, the pastoral 
Ruth, the lyrical David, are literature. 
And close are the relations of this litera- 
ture to the spiritual life. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 281 

Darwin*s book on the " Descent of 
Man *' is literature, but not of the highest 
kind. Newman's "Grammar of Assent" 
is literature, but not of so high a kind 
as his more personal " Apologia." Tyn- 
dall's " Lectures " are literature, — more 
so, from the point of view of style than 
Herbert Spencer's. Froude's "History 
of England " is literature, differing from 
the two last-mentioned books because it 
is of the literature of fiction and because 
it is altogether finer in its expression. 
Lingard, on the contrary, made good 
history, but poor literature. The circle 
of science does not touch the circle of 
literature when science expresses itself 
impersonally, — anything personally ex- 
pressed and not inconsistent with the 
genius of its language is literature ; but 
the degrees of literature differ as the 
faintest nebulae from the flashing constel- 
lations. This is as far as I can go in 
trying to describe literature. 

But life is the pulse of literature, — 
literature marks the movements of the 
tendencies of life. It progresses as the 
individual progresses ; it progresses as 
the nation progresses. And yet this 



282 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

progress, so far as the nation is concerned, 
has frequently ceased ; it has ceased even 
before the death of the nation. The lit- 
erature of a nation that has been great 
never dies. Plutarch and Seneca have 
influenced minds, Theocritus and Horace 
have influenced hearts, more than Caesar 
or Augustus ever influences minds or 
hearts. Life has always turned toward 
God ; and literature, echoing life, has al- 
ways written the symbol of God. Life 
expressed by iEschylus is far from the 
life that made Racine as he was ; life 
changing with Job is a far different life 
from the life that Faust loved ; and yet 
from Caedmon to Milton, from Pindar's 
Odes to Wordsworth's " Intimations of 
Immortality," life turns to the First 
Cause. St. Augustine expresses His 
beauty ; Dante, His splendor and jus- 
tice ; and Longfellow, drawn by that 
chain which binds genius to Him, shows 
His halo on the brow of faithful woman- 
hood. 

Life cannot escape from its Creator, 
and literature, pulsating with life, acknowl- 
edges His power. Leopardi, Carducci, 
Swinburne — fallen, clad, to use Ruskin's 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 283 

phrase, in " melancholy gold " — curse 
the flaming sword that will not allow 
Pan to come back to earth. Leopardi 
asks for death ; Carducci and Swin- 
burne yearn for the time before the 
Galilean had conquered. They express 
tendencies of life, not merely themselves. 
God, who is the centre of life, is the 
centre of the written expression of life, 
which is literature. St. Paul cries, with 
God in his heart : " Charity is patient, 
is kind ; charity envieth not, dealeth not 
perversely, is not puffed up. . . . We 
see now through a glass in a dark 
manner; but then face to face. Now 1 
know in part ; but then I shall know 
even as I am known.'' St. Augustine 
begins a passage full of joy in God : 
" And thou gavest my mother another 
answer to her prayers, which I remem- 
ber." All this, coming from the soul of 
life, is literature. If St. Thomas, in the 
"Hymns of the Blessed Sacrament" ex- 
presses scientia, his manner is exceedingly 
personal and literary. The theologian 
who pretends to despise literature, or to 
look upon it as a mere toy, as the Turks 
looked on woman, is likely to fall into the 



284 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

heresy of the Turks and to assume that 
his mother had no soul. 

There can be no doubt that some of 
the misunderstandings of the relations 
of Hterature to life are due to the prac- 
titioners of literature themselves. They 
have claimed to be as mystically irre- 
sponsible as the Delphic oracle or the 
HowUng Dervishes. Imagination — un- 
trammelled imagination — was their idol. 
They pretended that they Hved in flashes 
of divine fire, when, in fact, the clever 
had frequently caught them trying to 
strike damp matches upon mouldy " af- 
flatuses." There were no laws for them ; 
they sang as the wind sings; they were 
reeds by the river of the Ineffable. They 
gushed carefully written impromptus. 
Order, dignity, knowledge was valueless. 
And the more ignorant of the cultured 
took these gentlemen at their own valua- 
tion. And hence arose legends of the mad, 
glad, bad poet. And he warmed his hands 
by the divine fire in his cold garret. And 
he had no food but a roast leg of Pegasus 
served with laurel leaves boiled by the 
muses. And there was not any such per- 
son. And so they called him a Bohemian 1 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 285 

There have been, too, enthusiastic 
apologists who could not see that the 
great author and the little author were 
bound by the conditions of ordinary life. 
Literature, they have said, — literature 
that comes from great minds, — is uni- 
versal. Its producer knows all things 
by intuition. But Dante was a hard stu- 
dent ; still, there were many things he did 
not know. Coleridge, like a priest of 
Isis, gashed himself, to adore Shakespeare. 
The Bard of Avon was all-knowing, of all 
time — intuition made him so. Law! — 
gods, what a lawyer he was ! Philoso- 
pher ! — he must have been, in dreams, 
intimate with the Greeks 1 Zoologist ! — 
how wonderful ! In spite of Coleridge, 
lawyers have shown how superficial was 
Shakespeare's knowledge of law. It is 
evident that he was so ignorant of the 
facts of animal life, beyond Warwickshire, 
that he might have written Goldsmith's 
"Animated Nature." What he saw — 
and he knew how to see — he expressed. 
He was not above life or law or the con- 
ditions of life. He was of his time ; his 
local prejudices and points of view limited 
him. His power of synthesis was great, 



286 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

but he cultivated it from his youth up. 
He was no more all-knowing than Dante, 
or Calderon, or Goethe, or Wordsworth 
was all-knowing. 

On the other hand, in English-speaking 
countries, which are the last to realize 
what art means, literature has not been 
approached rationally, as Matthew Arnold 
scornfully admits. The man who had 
lately acquired much from the Germans 
without in the least understanding it 
laughed loftily at literature because he 
had discovered a new worm. Dante 
might sing of the seraphim, but your 
scientist of this sort doubted the exist- 
ence of seraphim because, as there was 
no record of their vaccination, they must 
have died of small-pox ! Mere philoso- 
phy he might accept; anybody of ordi- 
nary intelligence could count combinations 
of vowels, and it was even possible that 
the catarrh prevalent in the lake districts 
might have effected the consonantal 
sounds. These gentlemen would have 
sacrificed the Book of Job for a new 
principle of motion, and the Iliad for the 
discovery of the jumping apparatus in 
the skeleton of a flea. A new earth had 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 287 

come, without a new heaven, — romance 
and poetry and lyrical beauty had gone. 
Literature and science had met, and 
science had conquered, leaving 

A broken chancel with a broken cross. 

Of course this was irrational. The 
only man of letters who took this sort 
of thing seriously was Zola. He tried to 
turn himself into a scientific naturalist ; 
he became a creature so monstrous that 
even curiosity became disgusted. 

There can be no conflict between liter- 
ature and science. There could be no 
conquering of one by the other, nor driv- 
ing of one by the other out of its proper 
domain, unless the longing to draw nearer 
the immortal, the love of harmony, the 
interest in other lives, the desire for the 
ideal, the yearning for a broader and a 
better life were taken from our existence 
here ; for literature, the production of life, 
answers to the burning needs of life. 

Lowell says that fairy tales, consolations 
in the twilight of desolation, are " the 
dreams of the poor." Science could an- 
alyze Puck and prove him to be wander- 
ing phosphorus, and that the spectres of 



288 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Rip Van Winkle in the Catskills were 
due to microbes in his whiskey. Science, 
for a time, — being young and ignorant, 
but not intrinsically evil, — seemed to for- 
get that humanity loves the fairies of its 
dreams, not because they exist, but be- 
cause it wants them to exist. It was a 
phase of life that science should have 
attacked, and not literature, which merely 
presented this phase. 

Literature, rationally studied, will be 
found to touch life at all points. It 
does not always concern itself with the 
dreams of those who dwell in exile. It 
does not always concern itself with ideals. 
" Man's work," Newman says, in " The 
Idea of a University," " will savor of 
man, in his element and power excellent 
and admirable, but prone to disorder and 
excess, to error and to sin. Such, too, 
will be his literatui* ; it will have the 
beauty and the fierceness, the sweetness 
and the rankness, of the natural man, 
and, with all its richness and greatness, 
it will necessarily offend the senses of 
those who, in the Apostle's words, are 
really ' exercised to the discerning of 
good and evil.' " 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 289 

This is true, for literature is like the 
string of a violin in tune ; it responds to 
the slightest change of national tempera- 
ture. It was aristocratic and classical 
under Augustus and Louis XIV ; aristo- 
cratic and romantic under Elizabeth. It 
became in England, in 1688, classic again, 
to drift gradually into democracy. In 
France, after 1793, it was at once artifi- 
cial and sentimental. When Jeremy Ben- 
tham's ideas flourished in England, it 
became Utilitarian and preached the doc- 
trines of common sense. When Boling- 
broke reflected the tendencies of the time, 
it was affected with polite Deism. Boling- 
broke furnished Voltaire with ideas. And 
France, in return, sent artificial tears and 
sentimental theories to the English Sterne. 

Life acts and reacts through literature ; 
it asserts and denies through literature. 
But who can say how far the vital book 
influences a people, and how far the peo- 
ple have influenced the vitality of a book ? 
Literature forces the abstractions of the 
philosopher into the conduct of life. The 
pessimism of Schopenhauer is brought, 
through the novel, to our very hearth- 
stones. The illusions of self-styled truth 
19 



290 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

permeate our familiar companion, the daily- 
newspaper. " Man," as Fierns-Gevaert 
says, in " La Tristesse Contemporaine " 
" thinks of himself as an equal co-worker 
with God ; he believes that modern in- 
ventions supply oversights of the Creator 
in the beginning." One may find some- 
thing of this in Rudyard Kipling. *' All 
modernity," continues Fierns-Gevaert, 
"suffers for the lack of love. Our mul- 
tiplied activities, our haste in work, the 
quickness in communication, the desire 
for long voyages and the ease with which 
they are accomplished, hasten to a speedy 
end the marked decadence of meditation." 
Philosophical speculation and industrial 
changes affect the life of all classes, and 
literature expresses their effects. It seems 
only the other day as if the whole world 
was governed by pessimism, with litera- 
ture as its prophet. The essay, the poem, 
the novel, even the little lyric spoke of 
gloom and of hopeless gloom. Studied 
rationally as a manifestation of the psy- 
chology of life, — of the psychology of 
the individual, as well as of the psy- 
chology of a people, — literature gives 
the clue to the problem. But what 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 291 

method can be supplied to humanity to 
tell us when the action will end, in any 
movement, and the reaction begin ? And 
until we can find some scientific means of 
discovering the laws that govern the flux 
and reflux of human minds, we must be 
content to use literature as a working test. 
When the various human phenomena are 
explained, there will be no need to exam- 
ine literature apart from this explanation. 
The limitations of life bar out the analysis 
of literature aside from life. One limit- 
edly explains the other; and just as a 
single phase of literature seems fixed, 
a reaction or a revolt begins. " Ro- 
mance, the root of all evil, is dead, the 
pernicious ideal is dead," Zola exclaimed 
triumphantly, not very long ago; "the 
dreams of the poor are gone, the legends 
of the saints and heroes are gone — 
science, as expressed by the realist, is the 
meaning of the modern world !" 

Suddenly there is a change. The 
civilized world plunges into a sea of 
romance. The realistic rats and the 
pumpkin of Cinderella are changed to the 
apparatus of splendor in a moment. Is 
" Cyrano de Bergerac " or " Ulysses " a 



292 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

cause or an effect? This much is certain ; 
its idealism has found a ready response 
from the heart of life. Pessimism goes 
out; the dilettanti even smile again. 
In Paris it is said aloud that God may- 
no longer fear that He may not be believed 
in. Science no longer talks of analyz- 
ing the seraphim. Zola lays sacrilegious 
hands on the tabernacle of the spiritual 
life. The world all at once finds him 
ridiculous. Literature reflected the change 
from blatant doubt to mystical reverence, 
and concentrated the rays of the new 
light'. How powerful it is in its action 
upon life, and how sensitive to every 
change in the tendencies of life ! 

The wizard waves his wand, and we 
forget or are consoled. High to heaven 
we go with St. John, or down to hell with 
Dante. We have left for a time the chill 
of earth's wind. Life demands this — 
and the demand is a cry for immortality. 
Literature answers the demand, for liter- 
ature is a servant and a master of life. 



THE EBB AND FLOW OF 
ROMANCE 



THE EBB AND FLOW OF 
ROMANCE 

EVERYBODY finds it easier to 
describe than to define the word 
"romantic" as applied sometimes 
to the Homeric books, oftentimes to 
Mademoiselle de Scudery's " Grand 
Cyrus/' and always to Sir Walter Scott's 
poems and novels. And most arguments 
about the meaning of this term end, as 
they end in Alfred de Musset's " Lettres 
de Dupuis a Cotonet," in a series of 
contradictions. 

Of late, interest in the philosophical 
and social forces that affect literary move- 
ments seems to have increased among 
persons busy about other things. And 
the excuse for this essay — which contains 
the essential points of several lectures for 
students — is that it is meant as an 
answer to several questions from such 
persons. 



296 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

That the romantic movement and the 
reactions from it were dependent on philo- 
sophical, social, and political influences is 
obvious. That they were not always 
conscious — not always the result of rules 
or formulated principles — seems quite as 
evident. 

It is easy to prove that in the Golden 
Age of Spanish literature the literary 
movement was not a conscious, philo- 
sophical movement. 

The epoch of the drama in Spain — 
that epoch which Cervantes, Lope de 
Vega, and Calderon made, and which 
lasted about one hundred years — was 
romantic. It was romantic both in spirit 
and in form. The famous plays of Cer- 
vantes, " Numantia " and " The Captives 
of Algiers,'* disregard all classical rules. 
Cervantes did for the Spanish stage what 
Corneille did for the French, — he fixed its 
best elements ; and Lope de Vega, his 
successful rival, carried on the work which 
Calderon*s masterpieces finally completed. 
The seventeenth century, in the beginning 
of which Shakespeare died, saw, in Spain, 
Cervantes found a new school of novelists 
with " Don Quixote," and likewise pave 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 297 

the way, in the drama, for the wonderful 
Lope de Vega and the still more wonder- 
ful Calderon. 

In France Corneille borrowed largely 
from Spanish material, he remained classi- 
cal both in feeling and form ; and Racine, 
more human, more sympathetic, was 
almost an abject slave to the French 
versions of the rules of Aristotle. Cor- 
neille was so Roman in his feeling, and 
so imitative of the models furnished by 
Seneca, that it has been truly said that, as a 
rule, " all his men are demigods and all his 
women men.'* Cervantes, Lope de Vega, 
Calderon, wrote as if the rules of Aristotle 
and the classical formulae had never existed. 
They were as romantic as Victor Hugo, 
but they had merely to take episodes from 
the life around to make thrilling incidents 
in a comedy of the cloak and sword, or in 
that more heroic species of drama which 
answers to our idea of tragedy. 

Webster's Elizabethan romantic play, 
" The Duchess of Malfi," which is made 
up principally of ghosts and murderers, is 
not more regardless of the classical rules or 
more romantic than Cervantes' " Numan- 
tia " or Calderon's " The Physician of His 



298 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Own Honor." Previous to Cervantes, 
the imitators of Italy — the believers in 
imitation, which is the essence of classicism 

— had held sway ; but Cervantes turned 
to the people and reflected the taste of the 
proud, fantastic, yet grave and religious 
Spaniard. He succeeded, he tells us, in 
such measure that during the progress of 
at least thirty of his plays not even a 
cucumber or an orange — missiles used 
against the unpleasing comedians of the 
Spanish theatre — was thrown upon the 
stage ! Comedy, in the Spanish sense, 
was not comedy in the sense of Moliere, 

— a play of manners ending happily. It 
might be a very serious drama, rehgious 
in motive, grave in method, yet not with- 
out comic incidents. Cervantes changed 
it from four to fivQ acts. From the 
Spanish point of view, " The Merchant 
of Venice " and " Measure for Measure " 
are comedies, though the Elizabethan 
would probably have called them tragi- 
comedies and the French critics of the 
eighteenth century refused to classify them 
except as barbarous. 

Lope de Vega frankly says that he 
followed the tastes of the people. The 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 299 

king or the coterie had very little to do 
with him. He was, although he knew 
thoroughly all the classical dicta, entirely 
democratic. No plot was too intricate 
nor episode too improbable for him. And 
" The Wonderful Magician " of Calderon 
well shows how passionately romantic, how 
disdainful of the classical autocrats, the last 
great master of the Spanish drama was. 
The Golden Age of Spanish literature was 
romantic and democratic. It was, as 
Heine says of literature in general, "a 
mirror of life." It was not a conscious 
revolt against imitation or arbitrary rules. 
Lope de Vega put it naively when he said 
that he ''gave the people what they paid 
for." 

The religious side — deep, essential, 
fervent — of the Spanish people was not 
left out of their dramas. This romantic 
time has left some wonderful religious 
pieces, which must grow in the estimation 
of critics the better they are known. 
There are the " Autos Sacramentales " of 
Lope de Vega and Calderon. Cervantes 
was the first to conceive, for dramatic 
purposes, the soul of man as a little 
world, in which all the emotions, passions, 



300 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

aspirations, sins — supernatural grace itself 
— are personified. The origin of the 
Spanish theatre was not religious, though, 
like all theatres, it expressed religion when 
the people were religious. The religious 
drama, "Sacramental Acts," — splendid, 
elevated, as rich in poetry and colored 
language as the studded background of a 
Byzantine Madonna is in gems, — is a 
distinct expression of the personal and 
national spirit of Spain. The form of the 
" Autos " is romantic. They represent 
the religious drama at its highest point, 
and they could only come from and ap- 
peal to a people to whom the teachings of 
religion were not only familiar but vitally 
interesting. They are no wild, semi- 
barbarous miracle-plays or moralities, but 
works of art and poetry, touched with 
divine fire. They are the product of 
trained theologians and philosophers, and 
they appeal to no illiterate people. They 
represent a special phase of the religious 
romantic literary movement. 

If the poetry of Chaucer is romantic in 
spirit, it is only so in the sense that it was 
bound to no narrow treatment of subject 
or to no fixed models of imitation outside 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 301 

the poet*s intellectual taste. The intro- 
duction to " The Canterbury Tales " is 
realistic. No modern novel could, in the 
best sense, be more so. " The Knight's 
Tale " is romantic, if you will, because it 
clothes the Greeks of the old legends with 
the panoply of the Middle Ages. The- 
seus, the Greek, becomes a Duke, and the 
apparatus of the story of Arcite is brought 
down to the point of view of the four- 
teenth century. If we call Chaucer ro- 
mantic because he represented life as he 
saw it and delighted in his own time, why 
not call Homer romantic? 

" Chaucer's pages," says Professor 
Beers in his " History of English Ro- 
manticism in the Eighteenth Century," 
"abound with tournaments, hunting par- 
ties, baronial feasts, miracles of saints, 
feats of magic; but they«are robed as well 
with the everyday life of the fourteenth- 
century England." Here we have roman- 
ticism and realism touching. And if we 
apply, as we may, the spirit of Professor 
Beers's words to Homer, we must admit 
that the chief of all Greek poets is a 
classic without being more classical than 
Chaucer, and that, at least in his picture 



302 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

of Odysseus and the lovers of Penelope, 
he was as romantic as Sir Walter Scott. 

The drama of England down to the 
Restoration was frankly romantic. There 
was no conflict between the classical and 
romantic schools, though Ben Jonson 
doubtless sighed over Shakespeare's 
romanticism when he admitted that the 
author of" Hamlet" had little Latin and 
less Greek. It is certain that Shakespeare 
did not trouble himself about the rules of 
Aristotle, and that there were no critics in 
his audience who objected to the form of 
" The Merchant of Venice " as unclassical. 
Dryden might have done so ; but in the 
latter part of the sixteenth century Dry- 
den had not yet begun to be the first of 
English professional critics. As it is, it is 
to his credit that when, under the French 
influence of the Restoration, Shakespeare 
had almost been forgotten, he raised even 
a timid plea for him. But after 1688 — 
the year of Pope's birth and the beginning 
of constitutional government in England 
— classicism came into fashion. 

The Italian conceits and the euphuisms 
of Sir Philip Sidney and Surrey, carried to 
excess, had been ridiculed by Shakespeare 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 303 

and were out of fashion; and so were the 
spontaneity, the freshness, the love of the 
natural man, which had distinguished 
Shakespeare and the best of his contem- 
poraries. Addison and Pope gave the 
tone to verse and prose ; and, reticent as 
it was, the apotheosis of the commonplace 
as it was, it showed a healthy reaction 
against the false sentiment and unbridled 
license of the years of Charles II and 
James II. It was such prose and verse 
as comfortable deists might write, — deists 
who would consider the Apocalypse an 
exaggeration in bad form, and the death 
of a Christian martyr as a very shocking 
performance, which a grain of incense 
gracefully dropped before a well-modelled 
god would have prevented. Romance 
was out of fashion; for romance meant 
aspiration and unrest, an interest in the 
past, a reaction against the present ; and 
Addison and Pope and others were quite 
willing, before the comfortable fires of 
their favorite coffee-houses, to believe that 
"whatever is, is right." 

If Pope and Addison were aristocratic 
and classical, " icily regular, splendidly 
null," they preceded an era of democracy. 



304 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

The time when Addison could assume the 
mantle of Dryden and become an autocrat 
of literature was rapidly passing. The 
day of the patron was passing. The 
great Dean Swift might go about among 
his noble friends extorting guineas for his 
" little Papist poet, Pope" ; but the years 
were at hand when historians, poets, and all 
book-makers were to appeal to the people, 
not to a coterie. The Hotel de Ram- 
bouillet and the year 1600 were gone for- 
ever; the ladies whose criticisms made or 
unmade Corneille, who encouraged the 
young Bossuet, and who displaced a court 
preacher because they could whisper to 
that arbiter of letters, the Cardinal Riche- 
lieu, that he used non-academic words, 
had passed like the snows of last year. 
The time was coming when the democratic 
idea, which did not concern itself with 
kings and princes, was to find expression 
in letters and to dominate. In France it 
came out in the romantic revolt of Victor 
Hugo; from 1774 until his time it had 
been as sordid in letters as the Marats 
and Robespierres who let loose the hurri- 
cane of revolution. It was an appeal of 
the individual to individuals. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 305 

In France it was a conscious revolt, 
with principles and a formula. In Eng- 
land it expressed itself in a new vein of 
history, but, first, in the novels of Field- 
ing and Smollett. 

Shakespeare could not conceive a man 
heroic who had not noble blood. So sure 
of this was he that his first object when 
he went back to Stratford a rich man was 
to restore the family arms. Hamlet was 
a prince, Rosalind the daughter of a duke, 
Macbeth a patrician of his land, Perdita 
the daughter of a king, Portia of a great 
caste in Italy, and Romeo high among his 
people. Fielding changed all this, and 
the hero of the first great novel of the 
eighteenth century is a foundling. More- 
over, Fielding holds the mirror up to 
nature. He is a realist, but he does not 
proclaim himself so. The time, as he 
pictured it, is a coarse and animal time, 
when religion had ceased to be more than 
a name for a comfortable belief that the 
Supreme Being would never think of 
damning anybody who paid an income 
tax. The comfortable middle classes be- 
gan to reign. 

The novels of Miss Austen and Miss 
20 



3o6 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Edgeworth preceded those of Anthony 
Trollope, and have been succeeded by 
those of Howells and James. You can 
trace the line of realism back to Defoe. 
With Howells and James realism is con- 
scious and analytical. Nevertheless, it is 
an imitation of the French philosophy of 
the realistic, while in succession to the 
spontaneous realism of Miss Austen ; the 
latter answered to a demand from society, 
as Richardson's literary pap, flavored with 
Rousseau's rosewater and named " Clarissa 
Harlowe," had answered to a demand for 
a more sympathetic knowledge of human 
nature. Richardson was vocal of the 
democratic movement, though he prob- 
ably despised it as much as he despised 
the principles of Rousseau. 

In history Gibbon's " Decline and Fall 
of the Roman Empire," with its elaborate 
pagan paraphernalia and constant march 
of processional sentences, showed that 
history aimed to be literature. But it is 
to Macaulay we owe the development of 
the democratic movement into history. 
Macaulay says : 

"The historians have imposed on themselves a 
code of conventional decencies as absurd as that 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 307 

which has been the bane of the French drama. 
The most characteristic and interesting circum- 
stances are omitted or softened down, because, 
as we are told, they are too trivial for the 
majesty of history. The majesty of history 
seems to resemble the majesty of the poor king 
of Spain, who died a martyr to ceremony 
because the proper dignitaries were not at hand 
to render him assistance." 

The historian was no longer to write of 
kings and princes and battles, leaving the 
people, like dim spectres, to stand in the 
distance. It may have been that, with 
the exit of the Stuarts, kings had ceased 
to be picturesque. And if it be a choice 
between principle and the picturesque, 
literature is drawn to the picturesque as 
the metal to the magnet. At any rate, 
English democracy, nurtured at the time 
of King John and the Magna Charta, had 
slowly come to maturity. Macaulay, at 
any rate, turned to the people, to the 
private and public records of daily life. 
Literature was to become more and more 
the expression of humanity, and it fol- 
lowed the movement toward the people 
and from the people. Macaulay himself 
expressed his theory of the historian's 



3o8 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

changed point of view, and faithfully put 
this theory into practice. The memoir, 
the diary, the letter, became material for 
the writer of history. It was no longer a 
question of the progresses of Louis XIV 
or of the plan of Waterloo ; the lives of 
the men who fought, the social condition 
of the families that stayed at home, — all 
these are now things for the new investiga- 
tion. The legend of Stephenson sitting by 
his mother's fire and discovering the action 
of steam replaces the story of King Alfred 
and the burned cakes in the neat-herd's 
hut ; the picture of Franklin and his kite 
found more admirers than that of the 
foolish Canute and the advancing waves. 
In fact, the waves soused the king; and 
if a monarch had burned his cakes, the 
people saw no reason why he should not 
eat them or go without. Macaulay's 
method was exaggerated by Froude, with 
whom history became the personal expres- 
sion of untruth. History to-day concerns 
itself with humanity ; it may be called the 
psychology of the people, and the people 
are no longer incarnate in the person of 
the king. 

The poet, however, remains a democrat 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 309 

just as long as democracy can be made 
picturesque. The novelist, however, has 
a wider range, and is not so dependent on 
the picturesque. The novel was still 
realistic, — that is, it concerned itself with 
the probable in everyday life, until Sir 
Walter Scott arose. There had appeared 
tentative romances, like Horace Walpole*s 
and Mrs. Radcliffe*s, but they were lurid 
phantasmagorias. Sir Walter loved the 
past, and a century that was bounded by 
such an unpicturesque event as the 
Reformation irked him. The stirring 
Border Ballads rang in his ears. Besides, 
the cult of Goethe had tinged him with 
German romanticism. Between John 
Knox, grim, Hebraic, colorless, rude, 
denouncing the " Sabbath '' afternoon 
dances of Mary Stuart, and Mary, radiant, 
gay, distinguished, candid, and a queen, 
he was all for Mary. Luther*s vulgarity 
shocked him, and Calvin's pretensions 
filled him with contempt. Cromwell had 
good points for a romance, but those good 
points were visible only against a back- 
ground of chivalry. It must be confessed 
that dear old Sir Walter loved the glamour 
of courts, the clash of arms, and the 



310 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

panoply of feudalism. But he also loved 
the Gothic tracery of high-pointed spires, 
and all the old world of which the cathedral 
and the abbey were the centre. And he 
loved, too, the creatures who would not 
have been what they were if it had not 
been for the old, yet ever new, religion. 
It would be untrue to say that Sir Walter 
consciously began a new movement in 
literature when he wrote "The Lady of 
the Lake " or that more influential work, 
" Waverley." He simply followed his 
bent; he liked the telling of a story so 
much that, in his declining days, the labor 
he delighted in physicked pain, and helped 
him to the highest heroism. " Peveril of 
the Peak " and " The Bride of Lammer- 
moor," Edward Glendenning and the 
terrible Templar of " Ivanhoe " were of 
the company he cherished. 

The ideal was never so obscured in 
England, religion never so much of a 
social convention, utilitarianism so prev- 
alent and Philistinism so self-conceited, as 
in the beginning of the nineteenth century. 
The Reformation which had apotheosized 
the commonplace had cut off the English 
from their ancestors. The glory of the 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 311 

elder day was forgotten or ignored. It 
is hard for us to realize the interest ex- 
cited by the appearance of Sir Walter 
Scott's novels, — the memoirs of the time 
show that the " Wizard of the North " 
was the most talked of person in Great 
Britain. The reign of the romance had 
come. Realism, so far as it concerned 
itself with everyday life in England, was 
out of fashion. Utilitarianism gave way, 
at least in theory, to aspiration. To fly 
upward was the motto ; to get beyond 
the narrow walls of the present was the 
desire. 

Few writers on Christianity have ac- 
knowledged its debt to the imagination. 
They have tried, following the lead of 
the reformers, to support it by common 
sense, when the fact is that the highest 
form of religion has as little to do with 
common sense as it has with the stock- 
market. The apostle who made himself 
" a fool for Christ's sake " was as much 
beyond the understanding of the average 
man of common sense as the ordinary 
reader of cheap magazines is below the 
poet of the Apocalypse. Sir Walter Scott, 
pioneer of the movement of aspiration, 



312 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

used the form of prose and the form of 
the novel ; he was fortunate in that ; the 
imagination of England caught fire. He 
showed that there were forgotten splen- 
dors in English faith and love. He re- 
peopled the cathedral and the abbey ; he 
showed that the England of the Middle 
Ages was not the England of Fox's " Book 
of Martyrs." He cast aside the curtains 
of the commonplace, and the English 
beheld a new world all their own. The 
heroism they had lost so long, the romance 
hidden from them, appeared under the 
wand of the wizard : 

That through one window men beheld the Spring, 
And through another saw the Summer* s glow. 
And through a third the fruited vines arow. 
While, still unheard, but in its wonted way. 
Piped the drear wind of that December day. 

Men were glad to get out of the wind 
of the cold December and to feel the 
glow of the Spring. A return to chivalry 
meant a return to the Church. Gradually 
the movement grew, and we have Car- 
dinal Newman's own testimony to the 
value of Sir Walter Scott's influence on 
the re-reading of English history. The 
progress to the Church, in which Newman 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 313 

was so distinguished a figure, would 
have come, — for ignorance could not 
always prevail. But there can be no 
doubt that the romantic movement in lit- 
erature, which Sir Walter Scott both led 
and responded to, softened the temper 
of the English by broadening their views 
and illuminating their imagination. 

In France the romantic movement of 
1830 was a revolt, and a conscious revolt, 
against classic literary forms. Romanti- 
cism with Scott was a question of subject, 
of atmosphere ; with Victor Hugo it was 
a question of form. " Romanticism," 
Brunetiere says, speaking of the move- 
ment in France, " was not only a revolt, 
but a revolt made in order to uphold in 
honor all that classicism had, if not dog- 
matically condemned, at least effectually 
rejected. Romanticism is the ardor of 
incorrectness," as opposed to classicism, 
which, according to Brunetiere, is " the 
regularity of good sense, the perfection 
of symmetry." Heine makes the essence 
of romanticism consist of allegory and 
aspiration ; he speaks for that German 
point of view that had influenced Scott. 

Hugo's romanticism was certainly a 



314 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

disorder of the imagination, — violent be- 
cause it was not only a rebellion against 
conventional and traditional rules, but in 
opposition, because the French bourgeois, 
commonplace and self-satisfied, were as 
unspiritual as the English Philistines. 
The English middle classes that could be 
satisfied to look on Benjamin West as a 
great painter were no better than the 
bourgeois that acclaimed David and Hor- 
ace Vernet. Hugo was abnormally revo- 
lutionary. " Notre Dame de Paris " is a 
monstrous vision inspired by the frightful 
chimeras that keep watch from the roof 
of the old cathedral of many memories. 
Alexandre Dumas was more deeply in- 
fluenced by Scott than Hugo. Hugo 
represented psychological reaction against 
the classical ; the romantic France, before 
Richelieu and Louis XV, charmed him ; 
he threw himself into a great open space 
and narrowly missed chaos. Dumas was 
a story-teller before all, — regardless of 
the probable, but with the power of mak- 
ing the impossible seem probable. 

In all things the French go fast. 
It does not take them long to work 
out a problem. Lafayette's sentimental 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 315 

statement of the premises of the Revolu- 
tion and the way they worked it out shows 
that. The revolt of Hugo against literary 
conventions did not stop with "Notre 
Dame de Paris '* or with his drama, 
" Hernani." Dumas was an episode, in- 
fluenced by Scott and answering a demand 
from France for fairy tales of the past. 
Dumas founded no school ; he told his 
stories, and all France listened to them. 
They were exciting, and it was easy to see 
Anne of Austria and Cardinal de Retz 
and the celebrities of the Fronde through 
his glasses. As an artist, he was less 
hampered by the facts of history than 
even Scott. If D'Artagnan must die in 
one chapter, why not bring him to life in 
the next ? He belonged to that school to 
which Sir Walter Scott has a suspicious 
leaning, — he was capable of making his 
heroine sea-green, if such a proceeding 
could add to the dramatic effect. There 
is no doubt, however, that he was as 
potent in the art of story-telling as was 
Sir Walter, and he held his hearers spell- 
bound. While he wrote, there was no 
room for other romancers. 

But against the revolution of Victor 



3i6 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Hugo there soon rose another revolt. 
Romanticism cloyed, — the dungeons and 
donjons of " La Tour de Nesle " and the 
horrors of the old street of Paris were as 
dreams. There was a demand for pic- 
tures of the present and of real life. As in 
England Thackeray and Dickens, George 
Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell came after the ro- 
mantic arrival of Sir Walter Scott, so in 
France the realists came after Hugo and 
Dumas. 

The movement in England was a 
gentle and gradual movement. Thack- 
eray was the literary descendant of the 
realist Fielding and the sentimentalist 
Sterne. Dickens owed something to a 
much lesser man, the elder Pierce Egan ; 
and the difference in. their earlier methods 
shows the difference in their preceptors. 
In France the realists announced a new 
philosophy. Balzac was not a mere teller 
of stories — "the idle singer of an empty 
day " — he was an analyst, a psycholo- 
gical investigator. His mission was to 
sound the depth of all humanity. The 
novel was no longer to be a romance ; 
only the probable was possible. Balzac 
wanted to be taken seriously ; he was the 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 317 

high priest of a new cult ; so long as men 
and women existed, he could write — the 
inmost thoughts, emotions, virtues, sins 
of his time should be laid bare. 

Honore de Balzac was by no means 
a republican ; he was an aristocrat, and he 
always allowed his people — he even en- 
couraged them — to believe in God. He 
had the methods of the realist, and hence 
his contemporaries declared that he was a 
realist, for literary form is everything in 
France. But his heart was the heart of a 
romancer. His tnise en scene is as realistic 
as Dickens^s, but he is often as romantic 
and grotesque as Dickens. Still, he is 
held in France to have begun that mis- 
named realistic movement which ought to 
have had for its motto, "Anything that 
the devil does we shall deem it our mis- 
sion to exaggerate." Realism, analyti- 
cal realism, was acclaimed tumultuously. 
Balzac, the De Goncourts, Flaubert, fol- 
lowed one another. England already had 
realists as to method — Thackeray, Dick- 
ens, George Eliot ; and a realist who pre- 
tended nothing, who assumed nothing, 
who had no relations with the French 
school, but who belonged to the school of 



3i8 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

Miss Austen. This was Anthony Trol- 
lope. It was truly said of him that so long 
as men and women of the English upper- 
middle classes lived, he could go on 
writing. " Barchester Towers " and " Or- 
ley Farm '* are the most typical examples 
of English realism, after " Pride and Pre- 
judice,*' in our language. Mr. Howells 
and Mr. James have given us other 
good examples, tinged somewhat with the 
self-consciousness of the French, — "A 
Modern Instance," "The Rise of Silas 
Lapham," " The Portrait of a Lady," and 
" Washington Square." Of these, " Silas 
Lapham " seems to show most plainly 
the influence of Balzac. 

Realism itself could not escape analysis ; 
the newer man wanted to dry it as the 
chemist dries alcohol. Every drop of 
water must disappear. And then the 
Darwinian movement was affecting life. 
Realism, after all, cannot escape being 
synthetical, since even the most scientific 
of the new school was forced to call in 
the aid of imagination. Here was the 
difficulty. Besides, Balzac — even the 
all-seeing Balzac — hesitated to say some 
things ; Flaubert had his reserves. The 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 319 

movement of realism was hampered by- 
prudery, and it was not sufficiently " sci- 
entific/' Zola, instead of being the 
founder of a school, is the beginning and 
the end of an illogical attempt in litera- 
ture to dig around the roots of animal 
life in search of the monstrous grubs that 
infest the animals. The naturalistic- 
scientific movement somewhat affected 
Matilda Serao in Italy and the clever 
Spanish novelists, among whom are Galdos 
and Madame Pardo-Bazan. In England 
it touched George Moore. In Russia it 
influenced Tolstoi and Dostoeffsky. It 
has had no permanent effect, except upon 
D'Annunzio, who may call himself a path- 
ological criminologist of the scientific- 
naturalistic school. Literature, one sees, 
has for some time been forging cheques 
upon the Bank of Science, just as that 
bank was engaged in playing the same 
game with the Bank of Theology. 

In the drama — which the aristocratic 
and classical French Academy and the 
Theatre Fran9ais had carefully guarded 
until Hugo broke down all conservatism 
with " Hernani " — the physiological prob- 
lem play of the younger Dumas was 



320 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

followed by a great horde of dramas, all 
analyzing the relations of the sexes. In 
manner they were exquisitely technical. 
As to theatrical method, no stage has ever 
reached the height of the French in the 
last thirty years. But no stage, except 
that of the Restoration in England, was 
ever so degenerate. It affected the 
theatres of the whole civilized world. It 
helped to produce the gloomy Haupt- 
mann in Germany and the gloomier sex- 
problemist in Norway, Ibsen. It was so 
brilliant that the English and Americans, 
who have no opinions of their own on 
art, could only translate and imitate. Its 
force is spent, and the French theatre of 
to-day, like Italian art, makes bric-a-brac, 
and that of a frivolous kind. There are 
two men in France, however, who have 
redeemed the French stage, — Henri de 
Bornier and Edmond Rostand, who wrote 
the " Daughter of Roland " and " Cyrano 
de Bergerac." 

With " Cyrano *' has come in France 
a tendency to idealism and romanticism. 
There can be no doubt that a new literary 
reaction was badly needed. " Cyrano " 
was a dramatic success, not because it was 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 321 

great, but because everybody of sanity 
and taste was disgusted by the public 
presentment of problems which neither 
the literature of the stage nor any litera- 
ture could solve, and which could only 
show literature as impotent and degraded. 
" Cyrano " has another meaning, too, but 
only a Hmited and narrow one. It repre- 
sents that symbolistic movement which 
has not yet reached the modern literature 
of any other country. It can be fully 
understood only by those who know the 
history of the movement of preciosity 
under Cardinal Richelieu and the coterie 
of Madame de Rambouillet in France. 
We all remember how Moliere laughs at 
this in " Les Precieuses Ridicules," and 
how Shakespeare smiles at the English 
counterpart in the character of Osric, in 
" Hamlet." The chief of the symbo- 
liste movement in France is Henri de 
Regnier ; he is an amateur of jewelled 
words, a maker of sonnets which are mo- 
saics of sound. He Is a rebel against 
realism and literary naturalistic science. 
He and his school appeal to the senses 
rather than to the mind ; each word has 

its peculiar perfume, each cadence is 
21 



322 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

intended to arouse a mood, each pause puts 
the climax to an emotion ; if you know 
how precious the aroma of words is, how 
vital the cadence of sounds to the recep- 
tive mind, you can understand why Rox- 
ane fell in love with opaline phrase and 
the ruby-tinted sentence and the emerald 
word, and left out entirely the human 
being. Symbolism is part of the reaction 
against vulgar realism. The symbolist, 
who slept with the swine when he was a 
naturalistic realist, cannot now endure a 
crumpled rose leaf. 

In English-speaking countries the 
scientific-realistic movement has spent its 
force. Reverence and mysticism are com- 
ing into vogue again, and with them the 
romance. A man who does not to-day 
assume that he would like to believe, if 
he could, is as much out of the fashion as 
the man who doubted Spencer or Huxley 
twenty-five years ago. And the more you 
believe, the more you are in the current 
of the stream. It is the old motion of 
the pendulum. Therefore the romance is 
king. Poetry is even coming into vogue ; 
the poets are struggling out of their twi- 
light, and it will soon be day for them. 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 323 

Everybody that Is rich looks around for 
ideals, and everybody that is not rich 
hopes to acquire some as soon as he can 
afford to keep them. 

In the fine arts we have been much 
affected by a movement which is partly 
literary. It was a stream flowing from 
the great romantic river of the beginning 
of this century — the river of romanti- 
cism that helped to fertilize the Tractarian 
fields. 

The Preraphaelite reaction meant the 
saving of England from Philistinism. It 
was a revolt against the unintellectual con- 
ventions that had stifled the beautiful in 
England. Ruskin, who, if he had lived 
a hundred years, would have died too 
soon, gave it force in literature and in 
the art of painting ; Tennyson exemplified 
it in his earlier poems ; Dante Gabriel 
Rossetti expressed it in his verses and 
pictures. The intensity of the movement, 
its archaism, its affectations, almost sent 
the pendulum swinging back to Philistin- 
ism ; but the education of the people had 
gone too far. The admiration for the 
great masters before Raphael, the demand 
of Ruskin that all artists should seek the 



324 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 

beautiful in nature and depict it naturally, 
the accepting of simple forms, differen- 
tiated and distinct, in preference to the 
artificial symbols of nature which conven- 
tional painters had used unreflectingly, 
were essentials of this movement. The 
influence of this Preraphaelite movement 
spent itself in literature with " The Blessed 
Damozer* and "The Earthly Paradise." 
But in the art of painting, especially in 
the revival of the older forms of beauty 
for household decoration, the Preraphael- 
ite revolt has been very potent. 

The clue to the romantic reaction — by 
which the Oxford movement was vitalized 
and from which the Preraphaelites had 
their being — is thus named by W. J. 
Courthope in "The Liberal Movement 
in English Literature " : 

"If we are simply and solely positive, we 
shall not be able to create at all. The exclu- 
sive scientific order, which the philosophers who 
have appropriated the title of Positive would 
impose on society, is more remote from the 
reality of nature, or, at least, of human nature, 
than the wildest extravagances of the Arabian 
Nights. The revolt of the romantic school 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 325 

gainst the excessive realism of the eighteenth 
entury ought to prove, a fortiori^ that men vf'iW 
lot tolerate an intellectual system from vi^hich 
he mystical and religious element is altogether 
xcluded." 



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